My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir

Written by Vanessa Schneider

Narrated by Molly Ringwald

“A beautiful eulogy and a much-needed corrective” (The New York Times)—a love letter to Maria Schneider, the 1970s movie starlet who catapulted to fame in the controversial film Last Tango in Paris—only to live the rest of her life plagued by scandal, as told from the perspective of her adoring younger cousin.

The late French actress Maria Schneider is perhaps best known for playing Jeanne in the provocative film Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released to international shock and acclaim in 1972. It was Maria’s first major role, alongside film legend Marlon Brando, when she was barely eighteen years old. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life, traumatizing her and sparking a tabloid firestorm that only ceased when she began to retreat from the public eye nearly two decades later.

To Maria’s much younger cousin, Vanessa Schneider, Maria was a towering figure of another kind—a beautiful and fearsome fixture in Vanessa’s childhood, a rising star turned pariah whose career and struggles with addiction won the family shame and pride in equal measure. Here, Vanessa recounts the challenges of their overlapping youths and fraught adulthood and reveals both the tragedy and inevitability of Maria’s path in a family plagued by mental illness and in a society rife with misogyny.

Unsentimental and moving, My Cousin Maria Schneider is a love letter to a talented artist and the cousin who admired her, and a powerful story of exploitation and how its lingering effects can reverberate through a lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781797152646

Vanessa Schneider

Vanessa Schneider is a French journalist and novelist. She lives in Paris, where she works at the prestigious daily newspaper Le Monde. For over ten years, she has written award-winning essays and novels that have been translated abroad. My Cousin Maria Schneider is her eighth book, and her first to be translated into English.

Reviews for My Cousin Maria Schneider

[jt2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everything in this book is great. Everyone should read it

[Kristin Eller · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a touching portrait of Maria Schneider. Written by a cousin who loved her, barely knew her, knew her all too well, and in the end, wrote a book full of understanding of a complex, tragic, all too human woman. A story of all of the things that make life exhilarating and terrifying. The incredible highs and lows, that define and sometimes destroy us. A beautiful and honest tribute to a sadly largely forgotten woman.