JACQUES PERRIN

(13 July 1941 – 21 April 2022)

The French actor and film producer Jacques Perrin, who has died aged 80, had a very busy career in the film industry. In fact, he had two concurrent careers, beginning as an actor in 1946 and later on as producer and director. He made documentaries and television series and as a producer there are more of his films due for release up to 2024. His first feature as an actor was Gates of the Night (aka Les Portes de la Nuit), Marcel Carné’s 1946 romantic drama written by Jacques Prevert and starring Pierre Brasseur, Serge Reggiani and Yves Montand. Perrin had only an uncredited minor role but it was a prime start in a major production that heralded the beginning of a very promising career.

Perrin was born Jacques Andre Simonet in Paris to his theatre director father Alexandre Simonet and his actress mother Marie, whose maiden name of Perrin he adopted as his professional name. A strikingly handsome young man, Perrin trained at the Conservatoire National Superieur d'Art Dramatique, but it wasn't until 1958 that his career really took off in another Carné film, Les Tricheurs, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Pierre Brice, Pascale Petit and Jacques Charrier. Then he was in Henri-Georges Clouzot's La Vérité with Brigitte Bardot, Paul Meurisse and Marie-Jose Nat. Director Valerio Zurlini cast him in Girl With a Suitcase alongside Claudia Cardinale, and Perrin then went on to make more films with Zurlini including Cronaca Familiare (1962) with Marcello Mastroianni. Perrin was also in Costa-Gavras's The Sleeping Car Murders (1965) with a cast including Catherine Allegret, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Michel Piccoli and Jean-Louis Trintignant. At the Venice Film Festival in 1966 for his roles in Vittorio De Seta's Half a Man (Un Uomo a Meta) and in Angelino Fons' La Busca (The Search) Perrin won two best actor awards, the Volpi Cup.

The actor appeared in a pair of delightful musicals by director Jacques Demy. In the first, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), he played a sailor called Maxence who is in search of love. Filmed on the streets of Rochefort, it also starred Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, George Chakiris, Michel Piccoli, Danielle Darrieux and Gene Kelly. For Demy, Perrin also played Prince Charming in The Magic Donkey (Peau d'ane, 1970), based on the Charles Perrault fairytale, with Catherine Deneuve again. Perrin seems always to have worked with only the best in the French film industry, a sign perhaps of his own abilities as an actor and his abiding charm as a person. In other films Perrin played opposite Bernadette Lafont, Michele Morgan, Sylva Koscina, Rosanna Schiaffino, Isa Miranda, Julie Christie, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Claude Jade, while some of the directors he worked for included Mauro Bolognini, Pierre Schoendoeffer, Philippe Lefebvre, Yves Robert, and Margarethe von Trotta.

Perrin appeared in and produced Costa-Gavras' political thriller Z (1969), his first film as a producer at just age 27. It won an Academy Award for the best foreign film. He also produced for Costa-Gavras both State of Siege (1972) with Yves Montand and Renato Salvatori, and Section Speciale (1975), a wartime film about the murder of a Nazi officer, with Michael Lonsdale, Henri Serre, Bruno Cremer and with Perrin himself playing a lawyer. It won the best director award at Cannes, while State of Siege won the United Nations Award at Bafta, and the Louis Delluc Prize for the best French film of its year.

Another of Perrin's productions, Black and White in Colour (La Victoire en Chantant, 1976) won an Oscar for best foreign film. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, it concerns French colonists at war with the Germans in Central Africa during World War I. It starred Jean Carmet, Jacques Dufilho and Catherine Rouvel. In 1982 Perrin produced and appeared in Les Quarantiemes Rugissants (The Roaring Forties), Christian de Chalonge's mystery drama about a man who disappears at sea, from a screenplay based on the life of Donald Crowhurst.

One film - out of many - that is really outstanding in Perrin's career is Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988) in which Philippe Noiret played Alfredo, the old projectionist in the Italian village where young Toto (Salvatore Cascio) helps out at the cinema. When Toto grows up, he moves away and becomes a filmmaker but, when he hears of the death of Alfredo, he returns to his home village for the funeral. Perrin played the adult Toto, in a very heartwarming scene made even more moving by the music of Enno Morricone and his son Andrea.

Jacques Perrin produced nearly sixty films over a quarter century, acted in around a hundred and gave some forty television appearances. He was a major player, whether he was cast in military roles, as policemen or other figures of authority or in a romantic leading part, and he was never less than truthful, a skilled expert in his chosen profession. In his time he had also appeared in the Paris theatre, and from 1972 began another strand in his career by making documentaries around the world.

He married Valentine in 1995 and together they had two sons, Lancelot and Maxence, as well as Mathieu, Perrin's son from his first marriage to Chantal Bouillaut. Maxence was named after Perrin's role in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Jacques Perrin was awarded Commander of the Legion of Honour and Commander of the National Order of the Merit. In 2016 he received the Prix du Cinema Rene from the French Academy.

MICHAEL DARVELL