Bisset's initial passion was ballet, which she studied as a child, but as she grew into a willowy adolescent, she was considered too tall to pursue dance as a career. 13, 1944, she was the daughter of Scottish doctor Max Bisset and his French wife, Arlette, a former lawyer who taught her daughter to speak her native tongue fluently.
What remained constant throughout her four-decade career was her cool elegance, which preserved her iconic status as one of the screen's great international beauties.īorn Winifred Jacqueline Bisset in the town of Weybridge in Surrey, England on Sept. Unlike many actresses as they approached their fourth and fifth decades, Bisset remained active and in demand, playing a wide range of parts from stalwart mothers to seductive socialites. Few of these roles allowed her to express anything more than slow-simmering sexuality, but gradually films like Francois Truffaut's 'Day for Night' (1973), George Cukor's 'Rich and Famous' (1981) and John Huston's 'Under the Volcano' (1983) revealed her talent for intelligent, complex performances. British actress Jacqueline Bisset rose to fame in the 1970s as the object of desire for numerous top actors in features like 'Bullitt' (1968), 'Airport' (1970), 'The Deep' (1977) and 'The Greek Tycoon' (1978).
