François Périer

Biography: life and films

François Périer (real name: François Gabriel Marie Pillu) was a French film actor. He was born in Paris, France on 10 November 1919 and died in Paris, France on 28 June 2002. Immediately after he graduated from the Conservatoire, France's leading drama school, Périer began appearing in films whilst simultaneously pursuing a promising stage career. He made his film debut in small roles in Jean Boyer's La Chaleur du sein (1938) and Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord (1938), and by the mid-1940s he had come to be highly respected for both his stage and film work. An actor of immense charm, charisma and versatility, Périer was just as at home in the strange fantasy world of Jean Cocteau (Orphée, 1949) as he was in the trenchant realist landscapes of Federico Fellini (Le Notti di Cabiria, 1957). In 1957, he won a BAFTA for what is arguably his finest screen portrayal, that of the self-destructive alcoholic Coupeau in René Clément's Gervaise (1956). In the latter half of his career, François Périer gravitated naturally towards more complex and sinister roles, shady characters whose surface charms concealed a calculating malevolence. In the 1970s, the decade of the film policier, nobody was better suited to play the cold-hearted police chiefs, ruthless officials and vicious gangster bosses that cropped up in such films as Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (1967), Alain Resnais's Stavisky (1973), Alain Corneau's Police Python 357 (1976) and Alain Delon's Le Battant (1983).

Filmography