MICHEL PICCOLI
(27 December 1925 - 12 May 2020)
The veteran French actor Michel Piccoli, who has died following a stroke at the age of 94, was an international star player of enormous magnitude, making nearly two hundred films and many television appearances in his seventy-year career. What Jean Gabin was in the 1930s and ’40s, Piccoli was the equivalent, the great French film and theatre actor of his own generation. He could take on a part and, as he himself said, disappear into a character whether it be a commoner or a king, a hoodlum or a priest, or an everyday member of the bourgeoisie. He worked with the best directors in the business including Godard, Sautet, Buñuel, Melville, Malle, Resnais and even Hitchcock. Born into a family of musicians, Piccoli made his film debut in small roles from 1945. At the time he was rubbing shoulders with the Paris intellectual set of Sartre and De Beauvoir and the singer Juliette Grḗco whom he subsequently married.
After years of small parts and short films he appeared in Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1955) with Gabin and then in Raymond Rouleau’s Les sorciẻres de Salem (aka The Crucible) with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. Piccoli began to find international fame working with Godard on Le Mḗpris with Bardot and Jack Palance and with Buñuel on The Diary of a Chambermaid with Jeanne Moreau. Peter Ustinov directed him in Lady L (1965) with Sophia Loren and Paul Newman, followed by Alain Resnais’ La guerre est finie with Yves Montand. Is Paris Burning? was Renḗ Clḗment’s war epic with an international cast (Belmondo, Boyer, Delon, Caron, Cassel, George Chakiris, Claude Dauphin, Glenn Ford et al). He worked with Chakiris again on Jacques Demy’s musical charmer Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, with Deneuve and her sister, the late Françoise Dorlḗac. Deneuve was Buñuel’s Belle de Jour with Piccoli, and the same director cast him in The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty. Hitchcock used him for Topaz, Chabrol had him for Ten Days Wonder, and Marco Ferreri put him in La grande bouffe with Mastroianni and Noiret.
Appearing mainly in French films by French directors working at home, Piccoli was, however, in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, USA, filmed in the States with Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon. He was with Godard again for Passion, with Charlotte Rampling in Claude Lelouch’s Long Live Life, and in so many more films that he must have been the busiest actor in France. He was still working up to 2015 when his last film was a short called Our Lady of Hormones which he narrated. Michel Piccoli was first married to actress Elḗonore Hirt, the mother of their daughter Cordelia. He was then married to actress and singer Juliette Grḗco from 1966 to 1976 when they divorced. Finally, he was married to actress Ludivine Clerc with whom he has two children. Although he never won an Oscar, he was nominated many times for the French equivalent of the Academy Award, the Cḗsar, along with winning many other international awards.
MICHAEL DARVELL