Actress Jacqueline Bisset surfaced in Los Angeles this week looking agelessly luminous and lithe at the age of 81. The Hollywood star, who began her screen career in the 1960s, maintains her figure through an ultra-healthy steamed vegetable diet and regular physical exercise.
Bisset was raised in Surrey by an English father and a French mother. She worked as a model in Britain before signing a film studio contract with 20th Century Fox and relocating to Los Angeles in the 1960s, where she adopted a bohemian lifestyle near Malibu Beach.
Dietary and Fitness Regimen
Her slender frame is the result of a vegetable-heavy eating plan she adopted after suffering a bout of Epstein-Barr virus at age 40. In a 2001 interview with the Guardian, she described a typical grocery trip as buying spinach, endive, lemons, carrots, green beans, red and green peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, olive oil, mayonnaise, and wholegrain bread.
Bisset explained that she grabs endive leaves from the refrigerator as a quick snack. She admitted that while the diet felt dull initially, she grew to like it over time. She avoids eating large amounts of fruit or carbohydrates, obtaining her nutrients from dark green vegetables like broccoli, beans, and spinach cooked al dente rather than mushy.
During the week, Bisset grazes on steamed vegetables tossed in a vinaigrette made of quality olive oil and lemon juice. Her single dietary weakness is a midnight snack consisting of mayonnaise spread over wholewheat bread. She occasionally boils skinned chicken breasts to break into sandwiches or salads, though she dislikes large pieces of meat. She also prepares large vegetable soups to incorporate nutritious ingredients like kale, which she otherwise cannot stand.
In a conversation with The Lady at age 68, Bisset recalled that before turning 40 she ate everything prepared with butter, salt, and heavy sauces, leaving her feeling queasy in the evenings. "Now I eat a lot of steamed vegetables, and I love it," she said. "I’m much more health-conscious than I used to be. A lot of awful things happen to people as they get older, and I believe much of it has to do with the foods we eat and keeping the body clean inside."
Bisset also maintains an intense exercise schedule. Speaking to the Times of London at age 70, she disclosed that around 3:30pm each day she would "do five or six miles on the treadmill, then get on the rowing machine and finish with some weights."
Early Acting Career and Stardom
Bisset made her Hollywood feature debut in 1967 with a small role in the romantic comedy Two for the Road, starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. By 1968, she appeared alongside Frank Sinatra in the film noir The Detective and starred opposite Steve McQueen in the San Francisco cop thriller Bullitt, which remains one of her most enduringly popular films in the United States.
In the early 1970s, Bisset appeared in the ensemble disaster film Airport with Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin, as well as the horror picture The Mephisto Waltz alongside Alan Alda. She achieved a breakthrough in French cinema in 1973, starring in Jean-Paul Belmondo's espionage comedy Le Magnifique and Francois Truffaut's Oscar-winning film industry satire Day for Night.
Her success in France established a high-brow body of work that included collaborations with directors like Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, as well as actress Isabelle Huppert. A close friendship with French actress Marcheline Bertrand led to Bisset being named godmother to Bertrand's daughter, Angelina Jolie.
In 1974, Bisset joined an all-star cast in Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot alongside Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Richard Widmark, Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, and Michael York.
The Deep and Pop Culture Status
Bisset reached global fame as a sex symbol following her role in the 1977 underwater adventure film The Deep, co-starring Nick Nolte. Her swimming scenes wearing a white shirt without a bra caused a sensation and turned her image into a pop culture landmark.
Despite the movie's commercial success and the resulting bump in her acting fee, Bisset was dismayed by the unapproved exposure. In an interview given to the New York Post, she stated: "I tried to get the thing stopped. I tried to get an injunction on them." Having built a screen career while avoiding explicit scenes, she described the event as "a bit of a blow."
As her career entered the 1980s, Bisset starred alongside Paul Newman and William Holden in When Time Ran Out and earned a Golden Globe nomination for the comedy Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?. In 1981, she co-starred with Candice Bergen in Rich and Famous, directed by George Cukor. In 1983, she starred in Class as a woman having an affair with her son's best friend, played by Andrew McCarthy alongside Rob Lowe.
In 1995, Bisset starred in Claude Chabrol's French thriller La ceremonie opposite Isabelle Huppert, earning a nomination at the Cesar Awards. Her later credits include a guest spot on Ryan Murphy's television series Nip/Tuck in 2006 and the 2014 film Welcome to New York with Gerard Depardieu, which dramatized the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. She is currently filming Shelter Me, a project covering artificial intelligence and COVID-19 that reunites her with Nolte.
Personal Life and Relationships
Bisset has never married and has no children, but her personal life has included notable relationships with public figures. She had an affair with Nolte during the filming of The Deep, which Nolte detailed in his memoirs, and later dated Soviet ballet star Alexander Godunov following his defection to the West.
Reflecting on marriage in a 1998 interview with the Standard-Times, Bisset said: "Marriage is not something I've ever seen anybody do and be happy. I was just trying to be smart." She noted that she avoided marrying a past partner who would have made a good husband because she "felt he'd swallow me whole. I've been told I'm quite Oriental in terms of my style as a woman - I allow the man to be a man. I could easily get eaten."
In later comments to the Independent, Bisset admitted she had considered marriage at times, saying she had "thought about" marrying certain men "and when they wanted to, I haven't wanted to, and vice versa." She added: "Sometimes you get too much information when you spend time with people. You start to see things - bad habits. You start to discover them and then you have to marry bad habits and I'm not sure I can cope with them." She emphasized that her breakups remain peaceful: "I don't ever have bad relationships. I haven't broken up angry. I've just moved out of situations that have been overwhelming."
