Léone Nogarède

Léone Nogarède was a French stage actress and art critic who took part in the very first Avignon festival in 1947, playing the Queen in Jean Vilar's landmark production of Shakespeare's Richard II in the courtyard of the Palace of the Popes. She later built a long second career writing about painting, and returned to the Avignon stage more than sixty years after her debut. She died in Paris on 4 November 2026, aged 100.

She was born on 10 February 1926 in Beuvry, in the Pas-de-Calais. In the 1940s she trained at the École nationale supérieure des arts et techniques du théâtre (ENSATT) on the rue Blanche in Paris, where her friends included Maurice Ronet and Loleh Bellon. In 1946 she appeared in García Lorca's Mariana Pineda and in Louis Jouvet's production of Giraudoux's La Folle de Chaillot at the Théâtre de l'Athénée.

In September 1947, aged 21, she joined Jean Vilar for the first Semaine d'Art en Avignon, the event that became the Festival d'Avignon. She played Queen Isabella of Valois in Richard II alongside Jeanne Moreau, Germaine Montero, Silvia Monfort, Michel Bouquet and Jean Négroni. She took the role again in 1948 and 1949, and also appeared in Vilar's productions of La Mort de Danton, Shéhérazade and Oedipe. The costume she wore, designed by the painter Léon Gischia, is kept by the Maison Jean Vilar in Avignon, and a trompe l'oeil mural in the city shows her beside Maria Casarès.

Through the early 1950s she continued to act in Paris, sometimes under the name Léone Laisner, and at the first Angers festival she met Maria Casarès and Albert Camus. Her screen credits include Le Destin exécrable de Guillemette Babin (1948), Cartouche, roi de Paris (1950), in which she played the Duchess of Maine, and the television film Mars et Melpomène (1956). An illness kept her off the stage for three years, and in 1956 she gave up the theatre.

She turned instead to art criticism, writing for Plaisir de France, Connaissance des Arts and Les Nouvelles littéraires. In 1988 she became international secretary general of the French section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), stepping down in 1993 because of the ill health of her husband, who died that year.

At the end of 1946 she married the actor and playwright Yves Brainville (Yves de La Chevardière de La Grandville). They had three daughters, all artists: the painter Nathalie de La Grandville, the actress Camille Grandville and the choreographer Olivia Grandville. In 2010 Olivia brought her mother back to Avignon in Une semaine d'art en Avignon, a show recalling the founding of the festival, which toured France until 2015.

Her death was announced on 12 November 2026 by the Maison Jean Vilar, which remembered her as one of the pioneers of the Festival d'Avignon as it prepared to mark the festival's 80th anniversary in 2027.