JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIÈRE

(19 September 1931 - 8 February 2021)

The French actor, novelist, screenwriter and director Jean-Claude Carrière was the busiest man in the French film industry. His list of screenplays for features, television movies, documentaries and shorts runs to over 150 titles - and he also acted in nearly 40 films and directed four. Born to a family of vintners in south-western France, he studied to be a teacher. However, he began as a cartoonist, novelist and short story writer and then met the actor-director Jacques Tati who commissioned him to write novelisations of his films. A meeting with Pierre Etaix, Tati’s assistant, led to making their short Rupture in 1961 and two others, Insomnie and Happy Anniversary (Academy Award winner, 1963), plus a full-length comedy, The Suitor. Carrière then embarked on the first of many films he wrote for Luis Buñuel, The Diary of a Chambermaid with Jeanne Moreau. For Buñuel he also adapted Belle de Jour, with Catherine Deneuve, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bafta award and Oscar nomination), The Monk, The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire (Oscar nominated). He adapted Hotel Paradiso for Peter Glenville with Gina Lollobrigida and Alec Guinness, Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! with Brigitte Bardot, Le Voleur with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Milou in May with Michel Piccoli and Miou-Miou, Jacques Deray’s Borsalino with Belmondo, Milos Forman’s Taking Off and Valmont, Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum and Swann in Love, Andrzej Wajda’s Danton and Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac, both with Gérard Depardieu, Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Bafta award and Oscar nomination), Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre with Depardieu and the same story in Jon Amiel’s Sommersby with Richard Gere, Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash with Ralph Fiennes and many more in a prodigiously unstoppable career of screenplay and TV writing, not to mention his acting appearances, and he still has three posthumous films in post production. Many of the films he wrote were award-winners and, apart from his single Oscar, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 2015. He first married Augusta Bouy in 1951, then Nicole Janin and finally the writer Nahal Tajadod. He has two children. Jean-Claude Carrière died in Paris of natural causes, aged 89.

MICHAEL DARVELL