Charles Vanel

Biography: life and films

Few actors have had careers as long and prolific as Charles Vanel. For eight complete decades (from 1908 to 1988), Vanel was committed to his profession and, having learned his craft on the stage, devoted himself to the cinema for the next 76 years. He already had forty films to his name when the talkies came along, and then his career really began. In total, he appeared in around 170 films and made a further twenty or so appearances on television. Vanel's repertoire was as diverse as the films he appeared in. From impeccable functionaries to hardened criminals and unforgiving patriarchs, from humane military men to bourgeois professionals with dubious pasts, his screen portrayals just about encompass the entire dramatic range. It is no wonder that Charles Vanel is one of French cinema's most highly esteemed actors. He wasn't just a workaholic, he was a perfectionist who brought a remarkable depth and conviction to all of his performances. Watching him in any of his films you have no doubt that he was a master of his art - the greatest character actor France ever produced.

It's hard to believe, given his subsequent achievements, that when he was a boy Vanel had no greater ambition than to serve in the navy. He was 12 when he was turned away from a naval academy, because his eyesight wasn't up to scratch. He tried to get into the army, but with the same result. He finally escaped from his miserable adolescence by pursuing another dream - to become an actor. Born Charles-Marie Vanel on 21st August 1892, he originally hailed from Rennes in Brittany, the son of a postal worker, and had a younger sister Germaine. In 1904, the family moved to Paris where the Vanels opened a wine shop. It was four years later that the 16-year old Charles began treading the boards, first at the Théâtre Montparnasse, then the Théâtre Antoine. By mixing with members of Alexandre Kamenka's theatrical troupe, Vanel picked up on Stanislavski's revolutionary theories about acting and made these the crux of his art.

Charles Vanel made his screen debut when cinema was barely into its teens, appearing as a barman in a now forgotten short film made by Robert Péguy in 1910 titled Jim Crow. It would be another seven years before Vanel returned to cinema, in Louis Mercanton's La P'tite du sixième (1917). In this interval, Vanel was conscripted into the First World War and served with distinction with an infantry regiment, winning the Croix de Guerre. Invalided out of the war in 1917, he was able to resume his acting career with a tour of South America with Lucien Guitry (father of Sacha). In 1918, Vanel divorced his first wife, Yvonne Hansen, whom he had married just a few days before the outbreak of WWI. He returned to cinema in 1919, in the realist rural drama L'Âtre directed by Robert Boudrioz, a film that would not be released until 1923.

From 1920 onwards, Vanel was fully committed to the cinema and worked with some notable directors of the silent era - Victor Tourjansky, Germaine Dulac, René Clair and Maurice Tourneur. His first notable screen role was as a Breton fisherman in Jacques de Baroncelli's adaptation of Pierre Loti's Pêcheur d'Islande (1924). Prematurely aged and having a naturally sombre disposition, the actor never played the handsome juvenile but was almost always cast as surly, embittered or pitiful characters. His most notable performance of this period was as Napoleon in Karl Grüne's Waterloo (1928). Vanel had a particular regard for Jacques Baroncelli and, in total, worked with him on thirteen films, including his first sound film, L' Arlésienne (1930). He chose the worst possible time to become a film director - his debut feature Dans la nuit (1929), which he both directed and took the lead role in, was not well-received by the critics and suffered from the crossover to sound cinema. Vanel made one other film, a short titled Affaire classée (1932) with Pierre Larquey and Gabriel Gabrio.

It was in the 1930s that Charles Vanel's screen career took off. This he owed partly to director Raymond Bernard, who gave him important roles in two of his early sound films - first as a sympathetic trench poilu in Les Croix de bois (1932), then as a formidable Inspector Javert in Les Misérables (1934). Maurice Tourneur made good use of his dour persona in Accusée, levez-vous! (1930), Au nom de la loi (1932) and L'Homme mystérieux (1933), and he turned in memorable performances in Jacques Feyder's Le Grand jeu (1934) and Anatole Litvak's L'Équipage (1935), playing characters who could not be more different. In Julien Duvivier's La Belle équipe (1936) he became Jean Gabin's bitter rival for femme fatale Viviane Romance and in Curtis Bernhard's Carrefour (1938), harassed by a nasty Jules Berry, he plays an industrialist whose ignoble past catches up with him.

It was during the Occupation that Vanel took on two of his finest roles, first as the cold-hearted patriarch in Jean Dréville's Les Roquevillard (1943), then as the everyman type who selflessly assists his wife (Madeleine Renaud) in fulfiling her aeronautical ambitions, in Jean Grémillon's Le Ciel est à vous (1944). He was improbably partnered with Fernandel in Jean-Paul Paulin's La Nuit merveilleuse (1940) and then Tino Rossi in Pierre Billon's Le Soleil a toujours raison (1943). Rumours that Vanel had been a supporter of Maréchal Pétain caused him some trouble with the Resistance after the Liberation (the fact that some of his films, notably Les Roquevillard, had had a strong pro-Vichy sentiment didn't help), but the actor was acquitted of the charge of collaboration through lack of evidence.

The allegations of collaboration may well have been the reason for the marked dip in Vanel's screen career in the decade after the war. Certainly, there are few films of interest in this period of his career and the actor was mostly employed by second-raters such as André Berthomieu, Maurice Gleize and Jacques Daniel-Norman, when he wasn't working in Italy for such directors as Camillo Mastrocinque, Giorgio Bianchi and Fernando Cerchio. It was only in Pietro Germi's In nome della legge (1949) that Vanel's talents were well-utilised around this time - here he makes an implacable Mafia boss. It wasn't until 1953 that Vanel made his big comeback - in the role he is now best remembered for, partnerting Yves Montand on the long-distance lorry ride to Hell in H.G. Clouzot's classic thriller Le Salaire de la peur. This was the role that won Vanel a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Vanel went on to feature in another Clouzot masterpiece, Les Diaboliques (1955), in which he played a limpet police inspector who is thought to be the inspiration for Peter Falk's Lieutenant Columbo. This was followed by an entertaining turn with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955).

By now, having turned 60, Charles Vanel was at the height of his powers as an actor, and distinguished filmmakers were lining up to make use of his talents. Julien Duvivier, Luis Buñuel, Henri Decoin and Pierre Chenal gave him ample opportunity to expand his repertoire in a series of wildly contrasting films - L'Affaire Maurizius (1954), La Mort en ce jardin (1956), Le Feu aux poudres (1957) and Rafles sur la ville (1958) - with the emergence of a far tougher and nastier screen persona. Vanel was equally at home in the role of incorruptible judges and lawyers as he was playing ruthless gangsters and other assorted lowlife. In Clouzot's La Vérité (1960), the actor is at his most compelling as the humane lawyer coming to Brigitte Bardot's defence in one of French cinema's finest court-room dramas. In 1961, Vanel entered the world of Hergé in Jean-Jacques Vierne's Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d'or, and adopted Jean-Paul Belmondo as his reluctant apprentice in Jean-Pierre Melville's L'Aîné des Ferchaux (1963). He had an imposing presence as the king's procurator in François Leterrier's debut film Un Roi sans divertissement (1963).

In the 1960s and '70s, Vanel continued to be a familiar presence on French cinema screens and he wasn't overlooked by the New Wave generation. Marcel Camus, Costa-Gavras and Claude Chabrol all made good use of him in their films: Le Chant du monde (1965), Un homme de trop (1967) and Alice ou la Dernière fugue (1977). Other notable films of this era include Ettore Scola's La Più bella serata della mia vita (1972) and Francesco Rosi's Cadaveri eccellenti (1976). One of the most memorable of Vanel's later screen performances was in Jacques Rouffio's Sept morts sur ordonnance (1975), in which he gives a chilling portrayal of a doctor who is not quite as respectable as he seems. He finally bowed out of cinema in Jean-Pierre Mocky's Les Saisons du plaisir (1988).

From the 1960s, with his popularity in cinema on the wane, Vanel made several television appearances, most notably in the serial Les Thibault (1972) and the TV movie Le Père Goriot (1972). He received an honorary César in 1979 for his life's work. In 1986 he recorded a duet with Mireille Mathieu, La vie rien ne la vaut. Now well into his 90s, Charles Vanel retired to Mouans-Sartoux on the Côte d'Azur, where he lived with his third wife, Arlette Bailly, who was 36 years his junior (they married in 1962). It is here that he is now buried, having died in hospital in Cannes on 15th April 1989, aged 96.

Filmography

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