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After six years in exile in Hollywood during the war, Michèle Morgan regained her popularity with French audiences in 1946 with Jean Delannoy's film La Symphonie pastorale. She became the number one female star in France for a decade, dominating the box office and showered with prizes. Married to Henri Vidal, she was paired on screen with the most popular male stars, Jean Marais, Jean Gabin and Gérard Philipe. Her image evolved: whereas before the war she had incarnated marginality, purity and a non-threatening form of resistance to the patriarchy, after the war she embodied a more 'bourgeois' identity, both on and off screen, and her surrender to more traditional norms of femininity provoked contrasting reactions among the public, traces of which can be found in fans'/readers' letters published in Cinémonde, the most popular film magazine of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]