MICHEL BOUQUET
(6 November 1925 – 13 April 2022)
Michel Bouquet, who has died aged 96, was one of French cinema's great actors and a fine stage performer, too. His long career encompassed working with such directors as Abel Gance, Jean Delannoy, Robert Hossein, Anne Fontaine and, quite prominently, Claude Chabrol. For the French stage he appeared in many classic roles by Molière, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco and he was the first to present the work of Harold Pinter to French audiences. He was much lauded in his long career on stage and in films and television, becoming the French equivalent of an Olivier, Gielgud or Richardson, or in France he would be rated alongside a Barrault, Gérard Philipe or Raimu. He was indeed an actor for all times, for all places and for all roles. He made over a hundred film and television appearances and had an armoury of theatre work that kept him at the very top of his profession.
Born in Paris to his wine-maker father Georges and milliner mother Marie, Michel, one of four brothers, first wanted to train as a doctor but he left school at the age of fifteen when his father was imprisoned during the Second World War. Marie then moved her family to Lyon where Michel became a baker's apprentice and then a bank clerk in order to keep his family afloat. After the war and back in Paris, he had various jobs before his mother encouraged her son to take up acting and he subsequently studied with a member of the Comédie-Française, making his debut in 1944. He also trained at the Paris Conservatoire of Dramatic Arts. His rather sad childhood, in which he was bullied at boarding school, made him internalise his feelings which was a help in his future acting career.
During the 1940s he worked with the playwright Jean Anouilh and the director Andre Barsacq in several stage productions. Later on he played many classical roles, in Shakespeare's Henry IV and Richard II, Shaw's Heartbreak House, Molière’s The Miser and others. Much later on he introduced Pinter's The Collection, The Birthday Party and No Man's Land to the French theatre, while his other stage work included 800 appearances in Ionesco's Exit the King. Bouquet himself became a professor of drama and taught at the National Conservatoire.
In the cinema, his first film was Gilbert Gil's Criminal Brigade in 1947, followed by Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Manon, Jean Gremillon's White Paws, and an episode in André Michel's Three Women. In 1955 he narrated Alain Resnais' shocking documentary Night and Fog, about the Nazi concentration camps. He resumed his film career in the mid-1960s in Our Agent Tiger, the first of many films he would make for Claude Chabrol, which also included The Road to Corinth, La femme infidele, Juste avant la nuit, La Rupture, Cop au vin and the documentary The Eye of Vichy which Bouquet narrated.
In François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, he was one of the victims sought by Jeanne Moreau in revenge for her murdered husband. Bouquet also worked with Truffaut on Mississippi Mermaid with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve in 1967. His film career never stopped and he made many more films with other directors including Yves Boisset, Henri Verneuil, Andre Cayatte and Francis Weber. Jacques Deray's Borsalino, in which Bouquet played Maître Rinaldi, with Belmondo and Alain Delon, was an enormous international hit. He played Javert opposite Lino Ventura as Valjean in Robert Hossein's Les Misérables (1982) and was the older Thomas in Jaco Van Dormael's Toto the Hero. After the year 2000, his films included Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father and the title role in Robert Guediguian's The Last Mitterand and he was awarded the best actor César for both roles. He was also nominated for a César as the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Gilles Bourdos' Renoir. He was the winner of many other awards for both his film and stage work.
Michel Bouquet was made Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1983 and then became Officer in 1996, Commander in 2007 and finally received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour in 2018. He was married twice, first to the actress Ariane Borg in 1954 until they divorced in 1981, and then to Juliette Carré, an actress he often worked with, from 1982 until his death.
MICHAEL DARVELL