You can't blame a biographer for wanting to lose herself in the mystery of Jeanne Moreau, probably the most enigmatic, intuitive and simply beautiful actress to emerge from French cinema. The problem here is that Marianne Gray goes overboard; she's an earnest, eager biographer, careful with facts and details but unable to present them without gushing like a schoolgirl. She so dearly wants Moreau to shine, she unintentionally polishes her up like an object for the mantle. "Naturally Moreau is the 'cover girl,' clad in white Russian lynx, peeking (those bronze-ish eyes!), smiling (those lips, those lips!), through a Bentley Mark VI window and snapped by Helmut Newton," she writes, describing a 1970 French Vogue cover. Gray obviously wanted to write a "serious" book about the actress, but ended up instead with a breathless movie-star bio, cluttered with too many movie-plot synopses and her own colorless opinions. (Of 1973's "Nathalie Granger," she writes, "The film did nothing at the box office, but I rather enjoyed it, particularly for its self-assured pretentiousness.")

What keeps you reading are the quotes from Moreau herself -- mostly about acting and love -- and there are lots of them. "I've always thought of life as work," she says. "You have a certain amount of time given to you and you have to find dedication, passion, concentration. . . I sometimes feel like someone who owns a piece of land and does not use the seasons properly." And once in a while, Gray's fawning respect for her subject gives way to real insight. Of Moreau in her later career, she writes, "There was still that great, blazing joy the camera catches in her, but there was now a deep Celtic sadness. . ." If only the rest of the book measured up to that sentence. File it under: The Things We Do for L'amour.

-- Stephanie Zacharek