GILBERTE (Emmanuelle Béart)

The daughter of Swann and Odette.
After meeting on the Champs Élysées a child, the narrator falls in love with Gilberte, and her image haunts him until he no longer cares for her.
Gilberte inherits nearly eighty million francs from Swann's uncle
and Forcheville adopts her when he marries Odette.
This enables her to lose her Jewish surname which in turn facilitates
her marriage to Saint-Loup.
Gilberte is deeply unhappy with him and is continually unfaithful to her,
first with Rachel and also with his lover Morel.
Gilberte is a source of constant frustration to her mother
who has moreextravagant tastes than her daughter.
According to Odette, Gilberte is an "adorable but frightfully miserly girl."
The Duchesse de Guermantes also dislikes Gilberte, and at the
Princess de Guermantes' reception calls her a slut.
Proust based this character on Marie de Benardaky, a Polish noblewoman.


ODETTE (Catherine Deneuve)

The wife of Charles Swann, and later of the rich and vulgarly snobbish Monsieur de Forcheville. Rumour also suggests a previous marriage to Monsieur de Crècy. She lives on Forcheville's Tansonville estate, very close to Combray.


ALBERTINE (Chiara Mastroianni)

The niece of Madame Bontemps, she is one of the "girls in the first flower of womanhood" on the Balbec beach. Described as impertinent, she arouses a desperate passion in the narrator. In TIME REGAINED she appears as a ghost. Albertine's character symbolises disappearance and allows the narrator
to look closely at the idea of nothingness.
As Proust writes, "she was there and is there no longer."


MADAME VERDURIN (Marie-France Pisier)

Simone Verdurin is the 'patron' of a small group which holds a salon and thinks itself the arbiter of good taste.
Her husband, a former art critic, faithfully echoes his wife's views and skilfully
acts as an intermediary between the faithful few of the inner circle and the categorical opinions of his wife, who adopts or excommunicates according to whim.
The author of "Remembrance..." has had great fun with Madame Verdurin,
who remains firmly convinced that her company is a remedy for ennui.
Seeing herself as a well of culture, she also imagines herself to be the confidante of choice for all the amorous intrigues deemed worthy to feature at her table.
This is how Swann first became a regular member of the Verdurin clan.
Madame Verdurin is of bourgeois origin, but realises her social ambitions
by the end of the film by becoming the Princesse de Guermantes.
This character was based on Madeleine Lemaire, both for her social prowess
and her brilliant salon.


ORIANE, THE DUCHESSE DE GUERMANTES (Edith Scob)

Cousin and wife of the Duc de Guermantes and niece of Madame de Villeparisis, who brought her up. The narrator was in love with her during his childhood and adolescence. She has a protuberant nose and piercing eyes and literary tastes opposite to those of the narrator, who describes her as "a magic lantern character", as her only reality lies in her projection on a screen.

Oriane is deeply shaken by the death of her nephew, Saint-Loup, and harbours
a deep hatred of Gilberte.

To create this character, Proust drew in turn on Madame de Chevigné,
Madame Greffulhe and Madame Strauss.


RACHEL (Elsa Zylberstein)

Rachel is Saint-Loup's mistress, a famous actress, and the narrator often repeats that he met her in a brothel. The Duchesse de Guermantes boasts that she was the first to invite Rachel into her social circle, though she says of her: "you know,
she's awful, she hasn't the shadow of a gift and she's grotesque to boot".


BARON DE CHARLUS (John Malkovich)

The Baron is a Guermantes, the younger brother of the twelfth duke and therefore the brother-in-law of the Duchesse Oriane and uncle of the Marquis de Saint-Loup. He was married to a Princesse de Bourbon who died young. Within the family, he is generally known by his true name of Palamède, but the narrator most frequently refers to him as the "Baron de Charlus".

In the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he is nicknamed "Mémé". In Combray, he is said to be Odette's lover. Swann, however, who is familiar with this "ladylike man", knows that there can be nothing between Odette and Charlus. Indeed, when he takes a lover, it is Morel, who he meets late in his life during the Narrator's second stay in Balbec. Morel takes him to the Verdurins' where Morel accompanies Fauré's Sonata for Piano and Violin "in the purest style".

In "The Captive" Charlus is over sixty and has been excluded from the Verdurin clan. His love for Morel continues, however, to such an extent that later,
in the brothel, he will ask Jupien for boys who resemble his former lover.
A cultured aristocrat, he has read Balzac and has a considerable knowledge
of the arts. An impertinent chatterer, he is capable of extraordinary verbal violence, but is also very much an aesthete. His virile, germanophile ideal conceals a deeply feminine nature. His voice seems to "contain a brood of girls" .
Towards the end of his life, Charlus suffers an apoplectic fit, and by the time he appears at the Duchesse de Guermantes' reception, the baron is both very ill
and very old.

The general appearance, insolence and pride of this character can be seen
to be taken from the Comte de Montesquiou.
Aspects of Baron Doasan and Oscar Wilde and Prince Bozon de Sagan all
appear in Charlus, who like the Prince, was paralysed at the end of his life.


SAINT-LOUP (Pascal Greggory)

The nephew of Monsieur de Charlus and the Duchesse de Guermantes;
great nephew of Madame de Villeparisis and son of the Comte de Marsantes.
A soldier related to the Hohenzollerns.

The narrator meets him during his first stay in Balbec describing him as
"a young man with piercing eyes whose skin was so golden and his hair so blond, it was as if they had absorbed all the sun's rays."

Impertinent but likeable and determined to preserve an impeccable image of virility, he is the lover of Rachel, a former prostitute who has become an actress; and the husband of Gilberte, Swann and Odette's daughter. However he also shares his Uncle Charlus' tastes and keeps Morel in the manner of a mistress.

He dies heroically during the war.

This character is based on the Duc Armand de Guiche, whom Proust met in 1903
at the home of Anna de Noailles.


MOREL (Vincent Perez)

Morel, lover of Charlus, is first described by the Narrator as "the son of my great uncle's former valet." As a handsome and ambitious boy of eighteen, determined to "cut the bond to domestic service", he is awarded first prize at the Conservatoire, and proceeds to amuse society with his daring choice of recitals.
After meeting Charlus, Morel does his utmost to replace Jupien, in a vague attempt to add to his basic salary the income that, he believed, "the waistcoat maker received from the baron."
After his break with Charlus, he resists all the baron's efforts to bring him back
and becomes Saint-Loup's lover instead.
During the war, not knowing that he has deserted, Saint-Loup inquires after him, and the general who discovers that he is absent without leave has Morel arrested. Once he is freed, he leaves for the front where he is awarded the
Croix de Guerre, the same medal that Saint-Loup lost in his uncle's brothel.


JUPIEN (Jacques Pieiller)

A waistcoat maker and general handyman who has a shop in the yard of the
Hôtel de Guermantes.
His affair with the Baron de Charlus becomes a job of sorts, and he looks after him like a child after his apoplectic fit. He is the enthusiastic manager of Charlus' brothel.


THE NARRATOR (Marcello Mazzarella)

For the sake of convenience, we have named this character -
the witness who relates to us all that he thinks he sees,
understands or guesses in TIME REGAINED - Marcel.
He is the character that we see the most, and at the same time know the least about.

Although he is ubiquitous in TIME REGAINED, it is as an observer rather than
a participator.
His way of looking and listening make him a character on the sidelines -
which are also the sidelines of memory.
The photographic reality shows us that Proust's faces are extremely variable. Marcel the narrator will be just as "fluid" in his appearance, that of an individual observer moving between presence on and off screen, and absence.
In any case, it is his view which causes shifts in the story as it suddenly conjures up faces (ghosts) from the past, beginning with his own as a child in Combray.

The narrator is a writer who asks himself a very simple question: am I capable of writing? And via the twisting paths of three thousand pages, he comes to a conclusion: "true life, the only life that is finally revealed and clarified, the only life which is therefore fully lived, is literature."