Sylvia Bataille

Biography

Sylvia Bataille was an acclaimed French actress, who in 1939 won Le prix Suzanne-Bianchetti, given to France's most promising actress - other winners include the great actresses Audrey Tatou, Isabelle Adjani, Geneviève Bujold, Isabelle Huppert, Simone Signoret. Bataille acted in Renoir's Crime of Monsieur Lange, and A Day in the Country. Her first husband was the troubled, philosophical novelist Georges Bataille (Ma mere, Story of the Eye - both filmed 2004). The Batailles' daughter Laurence (1930-1986) became a psychiatrist and acted in Renoir's movie French Cancan. Sylvia left Georges for Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) an influential and controversial French psychoanalyst. After Sylvia's early retirement from acting, she worked closely with Lacan. Both Georges and Lacan were influenced by surrealists, including Spanish painter Salvador Dali, inspiring Lacan to devise a unique synthesis of psychiatry and Surrealism. With Lacan, Sylvia also had a daughter, the philosopher Judith Miller (born 1941). Sylvia eventually married Lacan (1953). Judith married the philosopher/psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller. In the 1930's, Sylvia was a member of the great screenwriter Jacques Prevert's (Children of Paradise, Port of Shadows) agit-prop theatre company, Le groupe Octobre. For 38 years Sylvia owned Gustave Corbet's still-controversial painting The Origin of the World. After her death, the French government received the painting to pay inheritance tax. Sylvia's sister Rose Makles married painter André Masson, who made a surrealist companion piece to The Origin of the World, which was attached to the Corbet canvas. Masson was a major influence on American abstract expressionists. Sylvia's other sister Simone Makles married the French government minister Jean Piel, who wrote and edited with Sylvia's ex-husband Georges Bataille.