Anne Philipe (1917–1990)

Anne Philipe, née Anne Marie Nicole Ghislaine Navaux, was born in Brussels, Belgium. She studied philosophy before leaving Belgium to live in France. In 1938, she married François Fourcade, an Orientalist, with whom she had a son, and was known as Nicole Fourcade. In 1946, she went to China to join her husband, who was serving as a cultural advisor to the French Embassy in Nanking. They traveled to India in 1948 along the ancient Silk Road with a caravan, making her the first known Frenchwoman to cross the desert of Sinkiang. She would later recount the story of this journey in her 1955 book, Caravanes d'Asie (Caravans of Asia). After a divorce from her first husband, she remarried in 1951 to French actor Gérard Philipe, and was known thereafter as Anne Philipe. The couple had two children. She reported for Le Monde and Libération on events in Venezuela, Japan, and Cuba, and made documentary films on Asia and Africa. She may be best known for her autobiographical book Le Temps d'un soupir (No Longer Than a Sigh, 1963) about the final weeks of her life with Philipe, who died in 1959, just short of his 37th birthday. Her other books included Souvenirs (1960), Les Rendez-vous de la colline (1966), Spirale (1971), Ici, là-bas, ailleurs (Here, There Elsewhere, 1974), Un été près de la mer (A Summer by the Sea, 1982), and Je l'écoute respirer (I Listen to Breathe, 1984). She also published L'Éclat de la Lumière (1978), a series of interviews with the painters Vieira da Silva and Árpád Szenes.