GASPARD ULLIEL
(25 November 1984 – 19 January 2022)
The French actor Gaspard Ulliel, famous for playing the young Hannibal Lecter and for being the face of Blue de Chanel male perfume, has died following a ski accident after he crashed into another skier in the French resort of Rosiere in Savoie. He was not wearing a safety helmet but had he worn headgear he may have died anyway. At 37 years old he was a most promising actor who had already made an impression on world cinema. He had previously won several Césars, the French equivalent of the Academy Awards. His latest work for Disney+ was on Moon Knight, a new television series from Marvel, in which he plays the part of Anton Mogart (aka Midnight Man) based on the comic character created by Doug Moench and Don Perlin.
Gaspard Ulliel was born in Paris to the stylist Serge Ulliel and his wife Christine, a producer of modelling shows. Gaspard had been an actor at school and the Cours Florent drama academy in Paris. His career had taken off by chance when a friend of his mother opened an agency and was looking for child actors. He joined the agency which led to his getting parts on French television from the age of thirteen. He later studied cinema at the University of Saint-Denis in Paris. He was still a teenager when he made his first feature film, Brotherhood of the Wolf, in 2001. Then he was in Summer Things, a co-production between France, Italy and Britain directed by Michel Blanc and based on the novel by Joseph Connolly. Ulliel received a César nomination as he also did for Strayed (2003), André Téchiné's wartime drama with Emmanuelle Béart.
Following Peter Greenaway's The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Ulliel played Manech Langonnet in A Very Long Engagement, one of five French soldiers thought to have been killed in World War I, when his fiancée Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) goes in search of him. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film earned five Césars, including one for Ulliel as Most Promising Actor. In 2006 Ulliel was in Gus Van Sant's section of Paris, je t'aime with Marianne Faithfull. He was the young Hannibal Lecter in Peter Webber's Hannibal Rising, a prequel to the other three films about the cannibalistic serial killer. He also appeared in The Sea Wall, an adaptation of Marguerite Duras' novel with Isabelle Huppert, and then went on to make several more French films until the 2012 DreamWorks animated feature Rise of the Guardians in which he was the French voice of Jack Frost, dubbed in English by Chris Pine.
Ulliel played the title role in Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello's biopic of the celebrated fashion designer, with Léa Seydoux and Jérémie Renier. Nominated for ten Césars, it only won for best costume design. However, Ulliel won a Lumière award and an International Cinephile Society award. In Xavier Dolan's Canadian drama It’s Only the End of the World (2017) Ulliel played Louis, a gay playwright with a terminal illness who returns home to reunite with his family. The film won two awards at Cannes and Ulliel gained another César. In the similarly titled To the Ends of the World he played a French soldier in Guillaume Nicloux's Indochina War film with Gérard Depardieu. Finally, Ulliel's performance in the Marvel TV series of Moon Knight will be screened posthumously.
Gaspard Ulliel also appeared in many other television programmes from 1997 and did the occasional theatre play such as Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane in 2012. In 2015 he was awarded the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, presented by the French Minister of Culture. He was in a relationship with the French model and singer Gaëlle Pietri from 2013 and with whom he has a son. He also previously dated the actress and singer Cecile Cassel and Jordane Crantelle, Chanel's International VIP relations officer, and had a brief relationship with the model and socialite Charlotte Casiraghi.
MICHAEL DARVELL