Maria Schneider (actress) Maria Schneider (actress) Maria-Hélène Schneider (27 March 1952 – 3 February 2011), known as Maria Schneider, was a French actress. She starred opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci's film "Last Tango in Paris" (1972). Schneider worked in more than 50 films and television productions between 1969 and 2008, including "Last Tango in Paris", Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger" (1975), opposite Jack Nicholson, René Clément's "" (1975), Daniel Schmid's "Violanta" (1976), Nouchka van Brakel's "A Woman Like Eve" (1979), Daniel Duval's "Memoirs of a French Whore" (1979), Jacques Rivette's "Merry-Go-Round" (1981), Predrag Golubović's "Peacetime in Paris" (1981), Enki Bilal's "Bunker Palace Hôtel"
Maria Schneider (actress) "I am an actress, not a prostitute!") and checked herself into a mental hospital in Rome for several days to be with her lover, photographer Joan Townsend. This, coupled with her refusal to perform nude, led to Schneider's dismissal from the film. (She was replaced by Teresa Ann Savoy.) Around this time and towards the end of the decade, Schneider also turned down or dropped out of productions such as Luis Buñuel's "That Obscure Object of Desire" (1976), due to creative differences (Buñuel famously replaced her with not one but two actresses for the same role), and Franco Zeffirelli's television