Julienne Mathieu

Julienne Alexandrine Mathieu is known for her roles as an actress, mainly in films by Segundo de Chomón during their time at the French company Pathé Frères in the first decade of the twentieth century. She appeared in more than sixty films, often in an unusual role for women, that of the “illusionist,” a magician who entertains the audience by performing tricks. She is therefore considered one of the most prolific actresses known from that time. However, my research suggests that she was also involved behind the camera, collaborating with Chomón in the creation of film tricks and animated scenes, which made her one of the first women in the fields of special effects and animation.

Mathieu was born on September 20, 1874, in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, a Burgundian village located in the department of the Yonne, where a year later French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was also born. Julienne was the first child of François Mathieu, a locksmith from the neighboring town of Tréigny, and Léonie Anaïs Monloup, who came from a family that ran the grocery store on the Grande Rue in Saint-Sauveur. Mathieu stayed in this village for a short time, before the whole family moved to Paris when she was between three and seven years old. According to her brother Julien Jules’s birth certificate (Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye: NMD [1873-1877]), the family still lived in Saint-Sauveur in 1877; based on population census records, it was not the case anymore in 1881 (Dénombrement de la population 1881). In Paris, the family settled in the elegant 16th arrondissement, at 18 Rue de Passy. When Mathieu’s father died on February 1, 1890, her mother was left in charge of their four children. Julienne, the eldest, was fifteen years old at the time.

Mathieu made her first appearances as a dancer on the Parisian stages of the Belle Époque, before joining the world of cinema in the early years of the twentieth century. On the birth certificate of her son, Robert Camille, born on January 31, 1897, Mathieu’s profession is, indeed, listed as “artiste lyrique” (État civil de Paris, 1897). At that time, she was living with her mother at 6 Rue des Martyrs and had just become a single mother herself, since her child was reported in the register as the son of an unknown father (“père non dénommé,” in French). This document would be amended almost three decades later, on August 25, 1925, to include filiation by the Spanish film operator Segundo de Chomón, master of trick films. In the music-hall, Mathieu played supporting roles that did not require formal dance training, as her performances consisted mainly of folk and exotic dances. She did, however, show versatility and mimicry skills that would prove to be very useful when she began her film career.

Several inaccuracies persist about the origins of Mathieu’s career on stage that my research helps clarify. The pseudonym she used as a dancer, Mademoiselle Mercédès, was connected to the music hall stage for four decades. It appeared particularly often in the programs of the Folies-Bergère between 1890 and 1895, and in those of the Olympia between 1896 and 1903. Yet not all these performances can be attributed to Mathieu. Furthermore, several photographs from the Nadar Studio confirm that there were at least three women performing under that same name. Only Mathieu’s appearances at the Olympia can in fact be confirmed (Alvarez San Román, “Is Mademoiselle Mercédès Always Julienne Mathieu?”).

Regarding her film career, what we think we know about Mathieu has been largely based on previous research about Chomón. First, it was once believed that Mathieu worked as a colorist, even co-leading a coloring workshop in France at the turn of the century and collaborating with Georges Méliès (Tharrats 59; Sánchez Vidal 21). It follows that Chomón would have had access to cinema thanks to this alleged activity of Mathieu. This assertion is partly based on Georges Sadoul’s Histoire Générale du cinéma, where Sadoul—quoting the camera operator Félix Mesguich—mentioned a woman named “Madame Chaumont,” a colorist specialist from 1900 (Sadoul 100). Madame Chaumont was then mistaken for Mathieu, thought to be married to Chomón, whose name was sometimes spelled “Chaumont” in France. However, Stéphanie Salmon from the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé found an invoice from 1920 that was issued by a woman named Mrs. Georges Chaumont, owner of a coloring workshop in Houilles (Malthête 42). The invoice revealed that the beginnings of Mathieu’s and Chomón’s film careers were not as reported. There is no other primary source that points to Mathieu working as a colorist.

Second, it is difficult to confirm that Mathieu and Chomón knew each other before he was hired by Pathé to work in Paris in 1906. The fact that he assumed the paternity of Mathieu’s son, born in 1897, should not dictate how the origins of their conjoined film careers is understood. As Iván Núñez Alonso has found, Chomón had married another woman, Juana Rey Dutray, in 1894 (Nuñez Alonso 58). Chomón recognized Mathieu’s son when Robert was twenty-eight years old, and there may have been several reasons that led him to do so. In the absence of more data, it is possible that Mathieu and Chomón met when they became colleagues at Pathé. This would mean that they followed independent professional paths before each joined the film industry.

Finally, the idea that Mathieu would have worked only on films directed by Chomón has been taken for granted. Thus, every appearance of Mathieu was used to attribute that film to Chomón, although Salmon argues that the actor Christian would be a more reliable indicator (Salmon 57). Indeed, Chomón was still living in Barcelona when Mathieu shot her early film projects. Between October 1904 and March 1906, she has been identified as the protagonist or main character in at least five films, three comic films (“scènes comiques”) and two féeries.

Until recently, the first title attributed to Mathieu was La poule aux oeufs d’or, which appears in the Pathé supplement of November 1905, according to Henri Bousquet (Filmographie Pathé 1896-1909). Both Salmon and Jean-Claude Séguin agree that the film could have been directed by Gaston Velle (Salmon 51–52; Séguin, “Segundo de Chomón” 25). In any case, La poule aux oeufs d’or was “[u]ndoubtedly the most popular of Pathé’s féeries,” as seven pages of promotional material were devoted to it in the 1907 Pathé catalog (Abel 171). It would have been Mathieu’s first major success. She also had the leading role of the Virgin Mary in Vie et passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907), directed by Ferdinand Zecca and considered one of the first blockbusters in film history. I have also found two scènes comiques prior to La poule aux oeufs d’or that feature Mathieu: the recently identified film with the English title The Humbugged Nurse (1904) and Mariez-vous donc! (1905), both from Pathé. Mathieu’s revised filmography, which includes approximately sixty titles, suggests that Mathieu’s film acting career ran from around 1904 through 1909, and that it might have been one of the most extensive and stable of that period. Her longevity might have been possible because she was hired by the leading company of the time, and because she was part of a consolidated team of performers.

In about a third of her films, Mathieu portrays an “illusionist” who performs some kind of magic trick either for the audience or for characters within the story (Alvarez San Román, “Forerunning” 180). The significance of Mathieu’s onscreen role is twofold. On the one hand, illusionists were usually played by men (like Georges Méliès), not women, in early cinema. On the other hand, the illusionists played by Mathieu often had names of their own, which attests to her popularity and possibly to Pathé’s early experimentations with the kind of serialization later applied to Max Linder as the first French film star (Alvarez San Román, “Forerunning” 180). For example, in Le miroir magique (1908), Mathieu appears as “Susanna, l’illusioniste,” and in Les fantoches de Miss Hold, (1908), as the titular “Miss Hold.”Although it is not known if she had performed similar tricks on the stage before, it is certain that, as the only female magician to appear on screen, she became a recognizable figure who could help strengthen Pathé’s brand. Yet Mathieu’s film acting career concluded at the end of the 1910s, when she moved with Chomón and her son to Barcelona. In 1912, they went to Turin, as Itala Films wanted to hire Chomón as a “specialist operator of trick scenes” (Tharrats 188). There is, however, no record of her acting again.

Importantly, Mathieu might have been involved behind the scenes, in the creation of tricks and animated scenes , especially during their French period. Many of the researchers who have worked on Chomón have pointed out that she was his main collaborator. For example, Juan Gabriel Tharrats states that Mathieu assisted Chomón “in less visible tasks [than acting] such as the recording of animation” (Tharrats 100). Although Tharrats’s sources are unclear, a photograph appears in his own book, as well as in Agustín Sánchez Vidal’s work, where we see Chomón and Mathieu working side by side on an animation stand (Tharrats 93; Sánchez Vidal 61). I would also add that Mathieu’s onscreen performances might provide further evidence of her work behind the camera. Indeed, her role of the illusionist demonstrates that she needed to know the functioning of magic tricks to make them unnoticeable on screen. Finally, the National Museum of Cinema in Turin has restored a stop-motion animated film, Lulù, dated 1923. It was donated by Mathieu’s grandson, Piero Chomón, and he attributed it to the joint work of his grandparents, Chomón and Mathieu, and his father, Robert. This is how the Museum introduces the streaming film online:

This short film was directed by Segundo de Chomón in 1923 in his private studio, with the help of his wife and son, away from any production structure and has never had regular distribution. Its discovery is due to the generosity of Piero Chomón, Segundo’s grandson, who made available the original colored nitrate positive to the Museum of Cinema [in Turin]. (Online program note for Lulù)

There is no other information than the one provided by the descendant but, if the descendant is correct, it would confirm that Mathieu was not only an actress but also one of the world’s first women animators.

As Tharrats records, the entire Chomón family moved to Paris sometime between late 1925 and early 1926 (Tharrats 278), but they maintained their Turin residence. Chomón passed away in 1929. On his death certificate, Mathieu is listed as his wife (État civil de Paris, 1929). Although the marriage certificate has not yet been found, they must have wed at some point, presumably after the death of Chomon’s first wife. Mathieu spent the last period of her life in Turin (Tharrats 283–284). Her grandson Piero told Tharrats that she became surly and did not want to remember her past life. She suffered the misery of the Second World War and died on December 1, 1943, in the Ospizio Cottolengo of Chieri, a town near Turin. Her death certificate states that her profession was housewife (“casalinga,” in Italian). After some years, and without anyone paying the costs, her body passed to the common grave and there is no tomb with her name on it. This is a sad end for a woman who was undoubtedly one of the most prolific actresses of her time and possibly one of the pioneers of animation and special effects.