Patricia Viterbo: the great “what-if” of French cinema
It might sound absurd, but movie sets can be dangerous places. They are carefully constructed to create the illusion of chaos and risk, yet in the process of staging that danger, one wrong move can make it real.
There are countless examples of the absolute worst happening on a movie set. The tragedy that claimed the life of Brandon Lee was pretty much identical to the one that took Halyna Hutchins from us. A freak accident on the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 left stuntman David Holmes paralysed from the neck down. All of them pale in comparison to the sheer horror that was the helicopter accident on the set of John Landis’s Twilight Zone: The Movie.
At “best” (a word doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting there), they’re freak accidents that could happen at any busy workplace with lots of moving parts. At worst, they’re the consequences of gross negligence that cost lives, then multiple millions in lawsuits. However, in the case of Patricia Viterbo, it’s neither. Nothing more than a truly tragic accident that shows just how dangerous the world can be and that we can’t take any moment we spend alive for granted.
Because Viterbo had so much to live for. She was a rising star in French cinema, and a celebrity in her own right as well, on the back of a successful modelling career and a high-profile relationship with the French answer to Elvis Presley, Johnny Hallyday. In 1966, she took a role in the Euro-spy James Bond knock off Judoka-Secret Agent, a nothing role where she played the role of a Bond girl that wasn’t even given the good grace to be in a Bond movie.
Yet it would be the last role she worked on in her life.
So, what happened to Patricia Viterbo?
On November 10th, Viterbo arrived back on set from her lunch break for her last day of shooting on the movie. She arrived in her blue MG convertible that was being driven by her co-star Henri Garcin. They were shooting a scene on the banks of the river Seine that afternoon, and at 1pm, Garcin mistook the brake and accelerator pedals, leading to an accident that plunged both of them into the Seine. Viterbo was a woman of many talents, but she never learned to swim.
Garcin managed to climb out of the driver’s side window and reach the shore, but Viterbo wasn’t able to extricate herself from the car. She wasn’t recovered until over an hour later when divers recovered her from the wreckage and rushed her to Boucicaut Hospital, where nothing could be done. She was pronounced dead on arrival at quarter past two in the afternoon. She was 27 years old.
The film was finished with a stand-in replacing her for the final shots, but it’s worth sparing a thought for Garcin as well. It’s easy to say that we would have done what we could to save her, but until we have been in a similar situation, we really can’t say what we would do. When confronted with death that clearly, when instincts kick in that hard, we would all do things that we would never think ourselves capable of in the cold light of day.
Not to mention that the event is still probably one that haunts him to this very day. I’m sure it’s not the only thing that haunts him.
