France will salute this Wednesday the memory of Michel Bouquet. A monument of French theater who died on April 13 at the age of 96, the actor will receive a national tribute chaired by Emmanuel Macron. This will also be the first public outing of the president since his re-election.
The Head of State will deliver the eulogy at the Hôtel national des Invalides, after speeches by Fabrice Luchini, Muriel Robin, who was a pupil of Michel Bouquet at the Conservatoire, and Pierre Arditi. The ceremony, which should begin at 4 p.m., will be open to the public, in the presence of the family and relatives of the actor.
Twice César for Best Actor
Unforgettable in The king is dying by Ionesco, which he has performed no less than 800 times, and in The Miser of Molière, Michel Bouquet died after more than 75 years of career. He had also left his mark on the cinema by playing in 2005 an astonishing Mitterrand on the evening of his life in The Walker of the Champ-de-Mars by Robert Guédiguian. This role also earned him the César for best actor, after that received a few years earlier for the film by Anne Fontaine how i killed my father (2002).
On screen, he also played secret characters in Claude Chabrol’s films (The unfaithful wife in 1969, Chicken In Vinegar in 1985), performed under the direction of François Truffaut (The bride was in black in 1967, and The Mississippi Mermaid in 1968) and was a masterful Javert, the inspector chasing Jean Valjean in Wretched by Robert Hossein (1982). But it was for the theater that this giant of the stage showed his preference, making known in France the work of Harold Pinter and putting himself at the service of great classical texts (Molière, Diderot or Strindberg) and contemporary (Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus or Thomas Bernhard).