The legendary French actor, who opened his career with ‘And God Created Woman’ and closed it with ‘Love’, worked with all the great European filmmakers
Jean-Louis Trintignant, one of the giants of French cinema along with Jean Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, died this Friday in Paris at the age of 91. He worked under all the great French and European directors. He achieved fame playing alongside Brigitte Bardot in Saint Tropez the shy Michel Tardieu in ‘And God Created Woman’ (1956), a film directed by Roger Vadim. Her wife, Mariane Hoepfner Trintignant, announced through a statement sent by her agent the death of the retired actor since 2018, he was ill with cancer.
His long and propitious career began with the ‘Nouvelle Vague’ and ended with one of the most outstanding films of European cinema of the 20th century, ‘Amor’, by Michael Haneke, with which he won the César Award for the best performance of the year 2012 In ‘Love’ he was already very ill. But he claimed to have been dead since 2003, when his daughter Marie was murdered by her partner, rock singer Bertrand Cantet, who beat him up causing brain edema. In 2007 the ‘Noir Desir’ musician was released from prison after a conviction for voluntary manslaughter, while Jean-Louis Trintignant did not regain the strength to film anything until 2012.
Theatrical debut in 1951
Born on December 11, 1930 in Piolenc, Vaucluse, the son of a wealthy industrialist named Raoul Trintignant and Claire Tourtin, at the age of 20 he moved to Paris, to study drama, and made his theatrical debut in 1951. He spent in this decade by the army coming to serve in Algeria. After several theatrical tours he appeared for the first time in a film in 1955 and the following year he achieved fame with his performance opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s film ‘And God Created Woman’. His fame would not stop growing.
The director Claude Lelouch chose him as the protagonist of ‘A man and a woman’ (1966), in which he played a racing driver. The success of the film made him an international star. From then on he established himself with films like ‘Col cuore in gola’ by Tinto Brass, ‘The Rails of Death’, ‘The Conformist’ by Bernardo Bertolucci and ‘Z’ by Costa Gavras, a political ‘thriller’ for which Trintignant won an award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Trintignant also starred in ‘Violent Summer’ (1959), a drama set in times of World War II that co-starred Eleonora Rossi-Drago, and ‘Dangerous Relations’ (1959), an adaptation of a novel by Choderlos de Laclos with Jeanne Moreau who directed Roger Vadim.
In the 1960s, he released some of his best-known films, such as ‘La Escapada’ (1962), by Dino Risi and co-starring Vittorio Gassman, in which Trintignant played a university law student who lives an initiatory adventure through different Italian towns .
‘A Man and a Woman’ (1966), a Claude Lelouch film in which the French actor had an affair with Anouk Aimée, was another of his great successes. He then shot ‘El Gran Silencio’ (1968), a ‘spaghetti western’ directed by Sergio Corbucci in which he shared the leading role with Klaus Kinski, playing a gunslinger, ‘Las Ciervas’ (1968), a film by Claude Chabrol in which, like the architect Paul Thomas, it was one of the vertices of a triangle completed by Jacqueline Sassard and Stéphane Audran
He also starred in ‘My Night With Maud’ (1969), a film directed by Éric Rohmer with Françoise Fabian in the role of Maud, ‘The Rails of Crime’ (1965), another Costa-Gavras title that was based on a novel by Sébastien Japrisot. ‘Is Paris burning? (1966), an adaptation of a book written by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre and ‘L’Homme Qui Ment’ (1968), a film by Alain Robbe-Grillet for which he was awarded at the Berlin Film Festival.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Bernardo Bertolucci directed him in the role of Marcello Clerici in ‘El Conformista’, a political film based on a novel by Alberto Moravia. He shared the leading role with Ann-Margret in ‘Funeral In Los Angeles’ (1972), an intrigue directed by Jacques Deray He took part alongside Romy Schneider in ‘The Train’ (1973), an adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon set in times of the Second World War
She was part of the cast of ‘La Mujer Del Domingo’ (1975), a film by Luigi Comencini with Jacqueline Bisset and Marcello Mastroianni. She participated in ‘El Desierto De Los Tártaros’ (1976), an adaptation of the famous homonymous novel by Dino Buzzati, directed by Valerio Zurliniean-Louis Trintignant,
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