When I was a teenager, I went to see Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. It starred a dissipated Marlon Brando and unknown 19 year old actress named Maria Schneider. Schneider was a runaway, sullen, enigmatic, baby-faced. Jeanne, the character she portrayed in the movie, seemed to be no different from the image Schneider herself projected: a hard-shelled street waif with no sexual boundaries.

Schneider died last year. Even though she hadn’t done much since Tango (there was a movie with Jack Nicholson and decades of drug and alcohol abuse) she still is memorable to most as the girl Brando sodomized using a stick of butter.

This is Schneider’s legacy.

A New York Times article spoke of how, when Tango was made, Schneider had been on her own since age 15. She considered Brando a father figure. When Bertolucci and Brando, over breakfast, saw the butter on the table and came up with the idea to use it, she went along, because she felt she had no choice but to please two people she trusted. Apparently, when it came time to shoot the scene, she was lying face-down on the bed, with the massive Brando on top of her, and “instinctively felt” she “would be the one to suffer for it.” Her tears, her fists pounding the mattress, were genuine. Ferdinand Moszkowicz, Tango’s assistant producer, said, “She was furious doing it, which was good for the movie.”

It was Schneider who lived with the fallout, the scandalized public, with strangers calling out to her to get the butter.

True, she was hardly an innocent. She was accustomed to fending for herself, and she’d gotten some major mileage out of her willingness to test limits. But even the most jaded people have to believe in their intrinsic value. To discover, while the camera is rolling, that one’s sole worth is extrinsic, defined not by who you are but what you are willing to do, had to be devastating.

Art requires sacrifice, but to be tag-teamed and thrown on the altar of whimsical perversion is a fate no one deserves.

That’s why for me, in my mind, the legacy of Maria Schneider is not the stick of butter, but the tears, and the pounding fist.