Audiences have seen him grow and mature on screen. The final image that a camera will have captured of him will leave him frozen forever in his 37 years. Gaspard Ulliel died on Wednesday. He was hospitalized at the Grenoble University Hospital (Isère) after being the victim, Tuesday afternoon, of a skiing accident in La Rosière (Savoie). According to the resort, he collided with another skier at the crossroads of two blue runs. The gendarmes had made it known that his vital prognosis was engaged.
French cinema prematurely lost one of its discreet stars, whose celebrity did not inspire people magazines and who, despite his fame, was rarely talked about outside of his films.
If Gaspard Ulliel began his career in his early teens, he was 18 when he really entered the radar of the profession. His appearance in Kiss whoever you want by Michel Blanc in 2002, then her performance against Emmanuelle Béart in The Lost by André Téchiné the following year implied that the big screen was going to have to reckon with him. If he was named in the best male hopeful category at the Césars for these roles, it was for A long engagement Sunday by Jean-Pierre Jeunet that he won the trophy, that of the second male role, in 2005.
“At 25, I thought I had a real career behind me”
We could then have thought that he was on the train of success. Gus Van Sant cast him for his segment in the sketch film paris I love you in 2006, Laurent Boutonnat saw in him his Jacquou le Croquant twenty years in 2007 and, the same year, he camped a young Hannibal Lecter in The Origins of Evil by Peter Webber. Prestigious on paper, these works did not obtain the expected public and critical success.
“At 25, I thought I had a real career behind me. And then there was a delicate turning point, I changed physically and made films that were less successful. So, at 31, on the contrary, I have the impression of being at the start of something, of another perspective. I am finally master of my own path, ”he declared to QG in 2017.
AT Grace, two years later, he confided: “It’s Bertrand Bonello and Saint Laurent who defined me as an actor. In the role of the couturier, this son of designers and muse of the Blue by Chanel, has literally put on a new costume, taking on a new density, giving to see beyond his good looks as a young first.
Admittedly, the feature film recorded just under 360,000 admissions, suffering competition fromYves Saint Laurent, another biopic, signed Jalil Lespert, which, released a few months earlier and more mainstream, brought together 1.6 million people in theaters. But even if, during the 2015 Césars, Gaspard Ulliel lost to Pierre Niney in the YSL match in the best actor category, his performance did not go unnoticed.
“I needed some sort of approval from my peers”
Quebec director Xavier Dolan has contacted him again to offer him the leading role in his adaptation of Just the end of the world, the play by Jean-Luc Lagarce. The film left the 2016 Cannes Film Festival with the Grand Jury Prize and, at the 2017 Césars, the return match for the best actor statuette was played. That time, when Pierre Niney was nominated for Frantz by François Ozon, Gaspard Ulliel won.
“I needed a sort of approval from my peers,” he admitted to Grace at the time of the broadcastOnce upon a second time, mini-series by Guillaume Nicloux, in 2019, on Arte. Little by little, this feeling of illegitimacy, of imposture, I manage to mourn it. »
If he had concentrated in recent years on auteur cinema, with the desire to defend bold proposals, Gaspard Ulliel also said his desire to find more accessible roles, more mainstream.
That’s probably why he joined the cast of Moon Knight, a mini-series produced by Marvel Studios and which will arrive at the end of March on Disney+. He holds one of the main roles, that of Anton Mogart, giving the reply to Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke. This could have been a new milestone in his career if his trajectory had not come to an abrupt halt one afternoon in January.