My Cousin Maria Schneider

A Memoir

By: Vanessa Schneider

Narrated by: Molly Ringwald

Length: 3 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

“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.

©2023 Vanessa Schneider and Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle. All rights reserved. English language translation copyright © 2023 by Molly Ringwald. Originally published in France in 2018 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle as Tu t’appelais Maria Schneider (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"There’s anger in Molly Ringwald’s voice as she narrates these accounts of Maria Schneider’s memories of the movie LAST TANGO IN PARIS, in particular Schneider’s notorious sex scene with Marlon Brando. Mostly, Ringwald’s narration captures author Vanessa Schneider’s writing, which sounds as though she’s conversing with her late cousin. Vanessa’s many recollections are brief — full of sadness at Maria’s life, which included a heroin problem and treatment in a sanatorium. She also recalls Maria’s joys, such as drawing with pastels. Ringwald does a great re-creation of the vague, seemingly offhand comments that Maria gave to a reporter’s questions about the shocking movie scene. The audiobook is a loving tribune, even as it reveals the toll that the controversial film took on the actress’s life." (AudioFile Magazine)

Beautiful , Honest

I love reads like this, full of love and admiration but told with open eyes and honesty .

Bittersweet memories of Maria

I loved Listening to molly on Vanessa’s memories of her cousin it was beautifully written and verbally articulated.

Don’t waste your time

This book is probably one of the worst I have had. It may have been a better read if it were an actual life story but a cousin writing her story was just terrible! Audible should not have charged me for this terrible book!

Boring mostly.

For such a dramatic life, it droned on with the narration, and I found myself wishing it would end.