Suzanne Delvé

Biography

A winter’s child of 1892, Suzanne Delvé first drew breath in Paris on 24 November, slipping into the world just as the City of Light was perfecting its electric glow. Two decades later she stepped before the camera, lending her face to Louis Feuillade’s serial whirlwind *Les Vampires* (1915), then to the fairy-tale shimmer of *La belle aux cheveux d’or* (1916) and, a decade after that, to the theological dreamscape *Le berceau de dieu* (1926). Between those dates she moved like quicksilver through early French cinema, leaving only flickers of herself on nitrate yet enough to keep her memory alive. Ninety-three summers later, on 10 August 1986, she closed her eyes for the last time in Montgeron, Essonne, the Seine’s quiet suburbs murmuring outside the window.