JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO
(9 April 1933 - 6 September 2021)
Courtesy of director Jean-Luc Godard, the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo became a star. He appeared in one of the most influential films from the Nouvelle Vague period of 1960s French cinema. In Breathless (aka À bout de souffle) he played a thief with an American girlfriend played by Jean Seberg in a free-wheeling screenplay that looked improvised but wasn't. Godard created a film noir very much in the style of Hollywood B-pictures of the 1940s, and with a nod to the likes of Humphrey Bogart. Belmondo, who has died aged 88, had already made films from 1956, the best of them being Marcel Carne's Les Tricheurs (The Cheaters, 1958), followed by Marc Allegret's Un drole de dimanche, with Danielle Darrieux, Arletty and Bourvil. A double tour (1959) was Claude Chabrol's thriller with Madeleine Robinson and Bernadette Lafont. Then came Breathless and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le doulos, another thriller from the real father of the New Wave. Belmondo then began to spread his wings in a bid to become an international star in Peter Brook's Moderato Cantabile with Jeanne Moreau, Vittorio de Sica's Two Women with Sophia Loren and Une femme est une femme with Godard again. He was good in these films but was outstanding in Melville's Leon Morin, pretre (1961), in which a young woman (Emmanuelle Riva) falls in love with Belmondo's priest. This won him an award at the Venice Film Festival and he was also nominated for a Bafta. He worked again with Godard on Pierrot le fou (1965).
Belmondo was born to Paul, a sculptor and academic professor and his wife Sarah, a painter. He had studied at a Paris drama conservatoire before beginning his stage career in 1950, and was also an amateur boxer, from which he inherited a broken nose and his rough and ready-looking appearance. Like Bogart he was not conventionally handsome but had a definite charisma. After his time with the New Wave films, he turned to comedy and action films which were very popular with his audiences as he did all his own stunts. He was much admired in Philippe de Broca's That Man from Rio (1964), Rene Clement's Is Paris Burning? (1966), Louis Malle's Le voleur (1967), the first Casino Royale (1967), François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (1969, with Catherine Deneuve), Jacques Deray's Borsalino (1970, with Alain Delon) and Henri Verneuil's The Burglars (1971, with Omar Sharif). He found time to work on more artistic movies such as Alain Resnais's Stavisky, but also continued to work with popular material including some television work: Alexandre Dumas's Kean (1988), Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Georges Feydeau's Tailleur pour dames (1993) and he played Jean Valjean in Claude Lelouch's updated film version of Les Misérables (1995). After suffering a stroke in 2001, Belmondo did not work until 2008's A Man and his dog, a version of De Sica's Umberto D, in which he played a man with talking and walking difficulties, his own afflictions. It was to be his last film. The winner of many international film awards, Belmondo was rated one of the 100 sexiest stars in film history by Empire magazine. He fathered two daughters, Patricia (who died in a fire, aged 40, in 1993) and Florence, and a son, Paul, with his first wife, Elodie Constant, and he had a daughter, Stella, with his second wife Natty. He also for a time cohabited with Ursula Andress and Laura Antonelli.
MICHAEL DARVELL