JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT
(11 December 1930 - 17 June 2022)
The French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who has died from the results of prostate cancer at the age of 91, was arguably one of the top international actors to come out of France. Trintignant worked for many major European directors, including Abel Gance, Claude Lelouch, Claude Chabrol, Bernardo Bertolucci, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Roger Vadim and Costa-Gavras. He was a handsome man with a quiet disposition that gave him a certain charismatic quality and, for all that, he was a great actor in a variety of roles.
Born in Piolenc in Vaucluse in southern France, he was the son of Raoul Trintignant, an industrial businessman, and his wife Claire. He read law at first but soon switched to acting, and at the age of twenty went to Paris to study with Charles Dullin and Tania Balachova. He made his stage debut in 1951. His first film appearance was in Race for Life, Christian-Jaque's 1956 drama about fishermen being poisoned at sea. He acquired a higher profile the same year by starring opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman, an international success. Although it was Bardot who the public wanted to see, an added attraction was the fact that Bardot, although married to Vadim, was having an affair with Trintignant at the time.
After national service, Trintignant returned to the screen as Danceny in Vadim's modernised version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959) with Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philipe. He then worked with the legendary Abel Gance on The Battle of Austerlitz (1960) with Pierre Mondy, Claudia Cardinale, Vittorio De Sica and Orson Welles. He also worked with Vadim again on Chateau en Suede (1963), a comedy based on Françoise Sagan's play which was given the dubious title in English of Nutty, Naughty Chateau. It starred Monica Vitti, Curd Jürgens, Françoise Hardy and Jean-Claude Brialy in a convoluted plot about odd goings-on at the said castle.
Never short of work, Trintignant played all kinds of parts in all sorts of movies, many of which were made only for the home market. One film that travelled the world, however, was Costa-Gavras' The Sleeping Car Murders, with Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Jacques Perrin, Michel Piccoli and Trintignant all embroiled in a serial killing mystery. Trintignant also worked with Costa-Gavras on Z, an exciting thriller based on real events involving the assassination of a Greek politician, in which he played the investigating magistrate. The film won two Oscars. It was followed by the global blockbuster that was A Man and a Woman, Claude Lelouch's story of two widowed souls who meet at a school and begin a relationship despite their tragic memories. With Trintignant and Anouk Aimée as well as the persistence of Francis Lai's score, the film coined it in at the box-office all over the world. It was even released in a dubbed version for the UK.
After that there were films by Alexandre Astruc, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tinto Brass, Nadine Trintignant (his former wife) and Les Biches for Claude Chabrol in which he had to appear opposite another ex-wife, Stephane Audran, then married to the film's director. Eric Rohmer's My Night with Maud was the third of the director's 'Six Moral Tales', with Françoise Fabian playing Maud. It was Rohmer's first commercial and critical success, albeit a rather cerebral and intellectual one. Trintignant then worked with Bernardo Bertolucci on The Conformist, a political drama based on the book by Alberto Moravia set in the Fascist era prior to World War II, with Trintignant as a bureaucratic intellectual finding it difficult to relate to normality. It was well received and won many international awards.
Near the end of his career, Trintignant made two very moving films about love and death for Michael Haneke, the first, Amour, with Emmanuelle Riva, in which they play an elderly couple, with the wife approaching death, while the second, Happy End, finds the actor with Isabelle Huppert as his daughter in a sequel about his character nearing the grave. Amour won the best foreign language Oscar and the Palme d'Or. Both Trintignant and Riva won the best actor and best actress Césars and were honoured with many other festival awards around the world.
Jean-Louis Trintignant first married the actress Stephane Audran and then the actress-director Nadine Marquand with whom he had three children, a son Vincent, a daughter Pauline, who died from cot death in 1969, and Marie, who became an actress, but she was murdered, aged 41, by her partner in 2003. A sad life for a great actor.
MICHAEL DARVELL