- Her best-known role is as Lisette in Renoir's The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu, 1939). Originally intended to be a small role offering only a couple of days' work, the extent of her part grew during the four-month shooting schedule.
- Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived for, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces.
- Having refused an offer from 20th Century-Fox in Hollywood, Dubost spent much of the second world war in Morocco with her French businessman husband, André Ostertag, before returning to French films.
- In 1931 Dubost began her film career as a soubrette, continuing in supporting roles in dozens of commercial comedies, mainly for home consumption, usually playing characters under her own first name, otherwise Annette, Babette or Nichette.
- Under the influence of her mother (whose name she took), Paulette became a ballet student at the Paris Opera at the age of eight.
- She appeared in over 250 films and worked with directors such as Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls (Le Plaisir 1952 and Lola Montès, 1955) and François Truffaut.
- In her memoirs, C'est Court, la Vie (Life Is Short, 1992), Dubost claimed to have attended courses given by the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and that, when in her teens, the infamous financier Alexandre Stavisky had fallen in love with her.
- After she had studied singing and acting at the Paris Conservatory, she was engaged by the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, where she performed in Arthur Honegger's operetta Les Aventures du Roi Pausole for two years.
- Paulette Dubost was a French actress who began her career at the age of 7 at the Paris Opera.
- She was born Paulette Deplanque in Paris, the 11th child of Suzanne Dubost, a singer at the Opéra-Comique, and her gas-engineer husband.
- Dubost continued to work into her 90s, and was paid homage just prior to her 100th birthday in the popular TV programme Vivement Dimanche, in which she was seen dancing to the show's closing music.
- For Louis Malle, Dubost appeared with Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (1965) and, 25 years later, in Milou en Mai (Milou in May, 1990). In the latter, she was the matriarch who is seen briefly at the beginning, sobbing while listening to the radio news about the riots in Paris in May 1968, but is soon revealed to be busy cutting onions.
- Her marriage ended in divorce in 1944. She is survived by her daughter, Christiane, an interior decorator.
- Max Ophüls cast her as one of a group of prostitutes on an annual holiday in the country in Le Plaisir (1951), with Jean Gabin, and in Lola Montès (1955) as Josephine, Lola's maid, a calming influence on her notorious mistress.
- She was in the late 50's gradually moving into more mature roles as the mother of heroes and heroines, though she was still seen as a servant, a barmaid, or a hotel manager, the latter in Maigret Voit Rouge (Maigret Sees Red, 1963), with Gabin in the title role. (She also had a role in Maigret Sets a Trap, 1958, starring Gabin.).
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