There is always a strange, shocking intensity and unreality in the early death of a beautiful young star - I felt it earlier this year at the untimely loss of the French movie actor Gaspard Ulliel, and perhaps even more so with the sad news about the South African model and actor Charlbi Dean, dead at just 32 years old.
A previous generation probably felt it on hearing about the car crash that killed Françoise Dorleac (sister of Catherine Deneuve) in 1967, just as she was about to hit the big time.
Dean was this year about to make her international breakthrough – a starring role in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning satire about the super-rich – Triangle Of Sadness.
I confess: it wasn’t a film I liked very much, but Dean’s scenes at the beginning are great, playing an Instagram influencer who takes her poutingly dissatisfied model boyfriend (Harris Dickinson) on a luxury cruise holiday she’s got for free.
She has an elegant, wan beauty and allure in the film, clouded with anomie and narcissistic entitlement. But the crisis that the cruise ship is heading for brings out something else in her.
Was Dean herself heading for something more? Very possibly. Charlize Theron and Jennifer Lawrence (and many more) started out modelling, like her. Dean had been promoted and showcased at the Cannes film festival – the best possible platform.
Who knows what she could have done? It is a sad, probably futile thought. Her fate lends a new layer of extra-textual poignancy to the movie. But what a tragedy.
