ROGER DUMAS

(9 May 1932 - 2 July 2016)

The French actor Roger Dumas appeared in some 150 films and TV series across sixty years. Although he was never out of work, many of his films were for home consumption only. His first film in 1954 was Wild Fruit, a family saga with Gérard Blain. He worked with Brigitte Bardot in The Bride Is Too Beautiful (1956); with Louis De Funes in Squeak-Squeak (1963); and with Belmondo and Françoise Dorléac in the action movie That Man From Rio (1964) which did get a wide release. He was directed by Claude Chabrol in An Orchid for the Tiger (1965) and also in Line of Demarcation (1966), a story of the Nazi invasion of France. From the 1960s Dumas appeared in many French TV series, including a mini-series of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1979) and Le gang des tractions (1991). He was with Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve and Philippe Noiret in Fort Saganne (1984), played Leontes in Éric Rohmer’s version of A Winter’s Tale (1992), and was Bonhomme in Jean Marboeuf’s war film Pétain (1993). Dumas carried on working on TV including a Maigret episode (1997), appeared in another version of The Count of Monte-Cristo (1998) and he was Lorrain in a mini-series of Les Misérables. The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (2008) looked at the lives of family members at the end of the 20th century, while Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert (2009) was about a conductor who was fired for employing Jewish musicians. His last film appearance was in First Growth (2015), a drama about a vineyard on the verge of bankruptcy. He had no children but was briefly married to the actress Marie-José Nat in the early 1960s.

MICHAEL DARVELL