A chameleon actor. Jean-Paul Belmondo, sacred monster of French cinema, died on Monday at the age of 88. In sixty-four years of career, Jean-Paul Belmondo has shot no less than 88 films, alternating arthouse cinema and great popular successes. A look back at a multifaceted career.
The young first of the New Wave
Jean-Paul Belmondo was 25 years old, when Jean-Luc Godard, then a critic for Cinema notebooks offers him to play in a short film, Charlotte and her Jules. The actor hesitates, but accepts under the insistence of his companion, Renée Constant, known as Élodie Constantin, a dancer with whom he married in 1959.
Claude Chabrol offers him to shoot Twice locked, after seeing it in the short film by his friend Jean-Luc Godard. gave him his first major role in 1960, alongside Jean Seberg, in Breathless, the story of a killer on the run, in love with a girl in Paris. A critical and public success, considered the manifesto of the New Wave.
If behind the camera, Jean-Luc Godard imposes a new way of directing, Jean-Paul Belmondo revolutionizes the way of playing by imposing a naturalness and a modernity that has never been seen before. With Jean-Luc Godard, he still turns A woman is a woman (1961) and Pierrot le fou (1965), an odyssey in which he finds Jean Seberg.
Jean-Pierre Melville, admired by moviegoers but ignored by the public, decides to hire the two emblematic figures of the New Wave, Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima my love) and Jean-Paul Belmondo for his film Léon Morin priest, in which the actor, masterful, puts on the cassock. In 1969, he turns The Mississippi Mermaid with another great figure of the New Wave, François Truffaut.
The charming stuntman of adventure films
Tak tak badaboum! Jean-Paul Belmondo is also a very physical actor, adoring to do his own unlined stunts, at the beginning of the 1960s, Jean-Paul Belmondo thus emerges as a backfiring hero of adventure films or swashbuckling. , in front of Philippe de Broca’s camera for Cartridge. A great popular success of the year 1962 which attracts some three million spectators in theaters.
He finds the director for a few other big hits, the chase movies. Rio man (1964), The tribulations of a Chinese in China (1965), The magnificent (1973) and The incorrigible (1975).
With Gérard Oury, he made a break in The brain (1969) and became an outstanding pilot in Ace of aces (1982) for Gérard Oury. The page of the New Wave is turned, Bebel is n ° 1 at the box office. With Georges Lautner, he plays Cops and robbers in 1979, then the secret agents in The professional in 1981.
The recipe is always the same: action scenes, stunts, fights, humor and a pretty woman who falls under his spell … At that time, we wait for the next Belmondo as we expect nowadays the next James Bond.
The policeman in capital works
Jean-Paul Belmondo has also distinguished himself in many thrillers. He tackled the genre in 1963 with two capital thrillers signed Jean-Pierre Melville, The eldest of the Ferchaux and The Doulos, both released in 1963).
He goes on with Borsalino, in which he shares the bill of the other great male star of the time, Alain Delon (Jacques Deray, 1970), but also notably The body of my enemy (Henri Verneuil, 1976), and the cult Fear over the city (Henri Verneuil, 1975).
The aging hero
In A monkey in winter Henri Verneuil in 1962, aging Jean Gabin said to the character played by Jean-Paul Belmondo: “Come and embrace you, you’re my 20 years old”.
In the 1980s, the public got tired of Bébel’s Tak tak badaboum. “For the Parisian intelligentsia, I had become a stuntman”, will analyze the interpreter of the Marginal more and more Solitary, his first big commercial failure in 1987. “The thriller too many. I was fed up and the public too ”, will confess
the comedian.
The swan song of an aging Belmondo will be staged by Claude Lelouch in Itinerary of a spoiled child in 1988, then in Wretched in 1995. Jean-Paul Belmondo then returned to his first love, the theater, where he took on great roles such as Cyrano de Bergerac in 1990. His health problems kept him away from the studios in 2001. While we no longer thought of the review on the screen, each new attempt is more cruel, as in A man and his dog (2008) by Francis Huster. Ironically, the story of an old man whom society rejects.