The Mystery of Olga Georges-Picot

The above image is Olga Georges-Picot (1940-1997) as the Countess Alexandrovna in Woody Allen’sLove and Death (1974), probably her best known role to readers of this blog. She was hired to replace Erin Fleming, who proved too difficult on the set — and what a fortunate replacement.

Most of Georges-Picot’s over 40 screen credits were in French film and television, although she was in some other American things as well. She can also be seen in Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) with Roger Moore,Connecting Rooms (1970) with Bette Davis and Michael Redgrave, The Day of the Jackal (1973) with Edward Fox, an episode of Orson Welles’Great Mysteries (1973), Alain Robbe-Grillet’sSuccessive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), Persecution (1974) with Lana Turner and Trevor Howard, and the TV mini-series Sins (1986) with Joan Collins. She was almost always cast in sexy parts, some of it amounting to softcore erotica. She also, naturally, modeled.

Her career must have scandalized her family, which contained many important French national figures. Her great-grandfather was historian Georges Picot (1795-1860); a great-uncle was François Marie Denis Georges-Picot (1870-1950), who negotiated the very Sykes–Picot Agreement that has made the Middle-East a powder keg for the past century (particularly topical as I type this); and her father Guillaume Georges-Picot (1898-1981) was French ambassador to China at the time she was born, later serving in similar posts in Albania, Venezuela, Argentina, and Mexico. Her mother was Russian, hence the Christian name of Olga, and her magical casting in Love and Death, a much wittier choice than Erin Fleming would have been. As a girl she attended posh private schools in Geneva and New York, and later she studied at the Actors Studio in Paris.

In 1997 Olga Georges-Picot leaped out of a fifth floor window in a Paris apartment building to her death. Was it the despair of an aging actress whose last screen appearance had been six years earlier? Was it chronic depression? Shame and regret at some of the choices she made? (“Non, je ne regrette rien” sang Edith Piaf). Was it some kind of international intrigue? (That’s completely irresponsible speculation, but she did live all over the world, and came from a family of diplomats, and had a Russian mother…) The sad event seems not to have been widely reported at the time, and in any case was probably kept quiet and private by her powerful family. It feels intrusive to even examine the topic. Suicide is ultimately the most private, solitary act, defined by its loneliness. Yet once it is accomplished all that remains is…a crime scene, and questions.