Jacques Demy’s biggest box office success, and to this day a holiday classic in France, Donkey Skin sees Catherine Deneuve’s princess fleeing an incestuous marriage to her father with the help of her feminist fairy godmother, played by a luminous Seyrig. An adaptation of the Charles Perrault story from 1695, updated with Demy’s bright and buoyant sensibility, music by Michel Legrand, and references to Appolinaire and Jean Cocteau, the film is the antithesis to Disney princess fare, as equally grotesque and overtly lusty as it is innocent and whimsical. Seyrig is a lilac fairy whose winking charms underscore the film’s sly sense of humor and effortless extravagance. She performed in both Donkey Skin and Daughters of Darkness (playing the opposite of a fairy godmother) in the summer of 1970. These roles drew upon Seyrig’s ethereal persona, which proved beautifully suited to the realms of artifice and fantasy inhabited by both films.