Bella Bambina

Dominique Sanda has not been happy with reporters because they write mostly about her sensational body and her long, lithe legs, her enormous blue-gray eyes, her mysterious air and her supposedly wild past. At 21, with six movies behind her, she is not only a star, but already a mother, and she insists that her mind is intent on graver matters. "I'm trying to be a serious actress," she says sternly, "and I hope you will write a serious story. It would be just about the first one."

Reporters can be forgiven. So entrancing is her exterior that it is hard to look much further. Even her directors, some of Europe's best, almost gush when they talk about her. "Dominique has charm and allure that are outside of our time today," says Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed her in The Conformist. He compares her to F. Scott Fitzgerald heroines, who destroyed men with their reckless charm.

Her directors find her aura of mystery the clue to her appeal. Vittorio De Sica, who worked with her in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, says that she must play characters who are not obvious, women who do not express what is inside. "With Dominique," he observes, "one must scrutinize, one must search out what she sincerely thinks and feels. It is all closed inside." In the moody, half-toned study of an aristocratic Jewish family in Fascist Italy, Dominique played the sheltered, unworldly daughter. In The Conformist, another brilliant film about the same era, she was the lesbian wife of an anti-Fascist exile. In her newest movie, John Frankenheimefs Impossible Object, currently being shot in France, she plays a woman obsessed by an adulterous affair with a novelist, played by Alan Bates.

A Great Gift. In her best-known films, she has played relatively withdrawn women. The camera has dwelt upon her beauty and her curious combination of innocence and sensuality, a combination that her lover, French Actor-Director Christian Marquand, calls her essential quality. "She's slightly schizophrenic," says Marquand, "and that gives her a great gift of poetry and a natural perception of things." Some observers wonder, however, if she can act in a wider variety of parts. De Sica seems not to be one of the doubters; he sees her liabilities more as a factor of age than temperament. "Una bambino." he says of the Dominique he directed, "with all the qualities and all the defects of the very young."

Until recently, in fact--probably until her alliance with the 45-year-old Marquand, who fathered her two-month-old boy--Sanda was in constant rebellion against a stringent French Catholic upbringing. When her parents refused to let her attend an art school in Paris, she left home at 16 and became a model. Success, travel and money came almost instantaneously. Some nude pictures taken at that time found their way into Playboy only this year, much to her disgust. "The nudity was an act of personal vengeance against my very strict upbringing," she explains. "Today it seems stupid." And her other rumored acts of personal vengeance involving sex and drugs? "Past history," she says. "It's not interesting to talk about that, at least not for me. There are some things that are too personal to talk about in public."

Dominique's story, in fact, avoids becoming a cliche only because her breakthrough was so extraordinarily easy. "I found her on the telephone," says Robert Bresson, who directed her in her first film, Une Femme Douce. "When I heard her voice, I guessed that she was beautiful." Like most women famed for their enigmatic charm, Dominique cannot understand what the fuss is all about. Now, far beyond her flaming youth, she does not lead such an unusual life. Though she and Marquand have no plans to marry, they are looking for a house in Provence, where they can raise their child away from the polluted air of Paris, in rustic if very comfortable domesticity. Such is her idea of high romance that one of her main mementos of Christian is a snippet of his toenail--suitably encased in gold and worn as an earring.

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