Jean-Pierre Léaud

Biography: life and films

The eternal adolescent, Jean-Pierre Léaud is one of the more colourful characters to have enlivened French cinema since the heady days of the French New Wave, in which he was a major contributor. He was born in Paris on 5th May 1944. Because his mother was an actress (Jacqueline Pierreux), he was naturally drawn to a career as an actor, although his prospects of ever finding work were threatened by his rebellious temperament. His first film appearance was in a small role alongside Jean Marais in Georges Lampin's historical fresco La Tour, prends garde! (1958). Then came the role that was to change his life, that of 12-year-old Antoine Doinel in Les 400 coups (1959), the film that launched François Truffaut's filmmaking career and established the French New Wave as a potent force in French cinema in the late 1950s.

At the age of 15, Jean-Pierre Léaud became an overnight star as a result of the worldwide success of Les 400 coups, and in Truffaut he found an ideal adopted father who could guide him in both his professional and private lives. The stark frozen image of a confused and isolated Doinel at the end of Truffaut's first film had a haunting potency and it seemed inevitable that Léaud would become one of the most emblematic actors of the French New Wave, working with not only Truffaut but also his contemporaries, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Jean Eustache. Léaud reprised the role that had made him famous in a short film entitled Antoine et Colette (1962) which was Truffaut's contribution to the anthology film L'Amour à vingt ans (1962), and then in three subsequent features: Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugale (1970) and L'Amour en fuite (1979). The spectre of Antoine Doinel would cast a long shadow over Léaud's career, and it is doubtful whether the actor ever managed to put it behind him.

One of the things that first endeared Léaud to Truffaut was his charming sense of unreality. Truffaut put it well when he said that he was an 'anti-documentary actor' - "when he said hello you felt you were in a work of fiction, perhaps even a work of science-fiction". Jean-Pierre Léaud may not be in the Laurence Olivier league of acting, but it is hard to deny that he is a compelling performer - even if he appears strangely detached from every situation he finds himself in. If Léaud is a fraud, then he is a fraud that we cannot help falling in love with. Truffaut described him as the best actor of his generation - a bizarre assertion until you stop and consider how effective Léaud was in his greatest film roles. Even in his lesser roles, there is a seductive bricoleur insouciance about Léaud's performances which makes him totally captivating and instantly likeable.

The film in which Léaud was most in his element has to be Jacques Rivette's cinematic marathon, Out 1, although such is the length of this film and the abject weirdness of its subject matter that it is rarely screened, even though it is undoubtedly one of the great cinematic achievements of the 20th century. As the young man struggling to piece together the clues of a mystery that will lead him to a secret society, Léaud casually discards all of his artistic inhibitions (well, the few that he possesses) and gives an electrifying performance which once seen is never forgotten. His whimsically strident contributions to the films he made for Godard before this - La Chinoise (1967) and Week End (1967) - offer the merest shadow of his work on Out 1. There is only one other film in which Léaud attained a similar level of brilliance, and that was Jean Eustache's minimalist masterpiece La Maman et la putain (1973). If Léaud had only appeared in these two films he would have earned his place in film history. But these are just two milestones in a long and varied career in which the actor has taken on more than 80 roles, in films that range from the mindblowingly magnificent to the unbelievably atrocious.

Ever loyal to his protégé, Francois Truffaut gave Léaud one of his best dramatic roles in his historical romance Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971). Even if Léaud ultimately fails to be convincing as a writer (or even a human being), he inhabits the starched Brontëesque world that Truffaut drops him into with a beguiling innocence, the stiff, theatrical quality of his performance helping to sustain the subtle distancing effect that his director appears to be striving for. If Truffaut hadn't previously made Jules et Jim, this might well be considered his greatest film, with the result that Léaud would be taken far more seriously as a dramatic actor than he is.

For the most part, Léaud's film career can be written off as a failure. Very few directors had Truffaut's confidence in him, and even fewer were able to make effective use of his idiosyncratic talents. Even the great Pier Paolo Pasolini struggled to make good use of Léaud in his film Porcile (1969), and the experience of making the film was as painful for the actor as it was for the director. Since Truffaut's untimely death in 1984, Léaud looks increasingly like a man who has lost his identity, and whilst his film appearances are a welcome treat for his fans, it often seems that he is being cast not because of his suitability for any particular role, but because of his past association with the French New Wave, something that still confers on him the status of an iconoclast or outsider.

The kind of role for which Léaud is now well-suited, in the twilight of his career, is that of the marginalised artist, exemplified by his portrayal of florid film directors in Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996) and Bertrand Bonello's Le Pornographe (2001). He was just as at home in Serge Le Péron's murky thriller L'Affaire Marcorelle (2000), perfectly chosen to play a man whose fragmented existence has become indistinguishable from his recurring nightmares. Likewise, director Aki Kaurismäki could hardly have chosen a better actor than Léaud to take the lead in his unhinged black comedy I Hired a Contract Killer (1990), the Brechtian detachment of a one-off filmmaker achieving a perfect synergy with the unreal histrionics of a one-off actor. In so many of his films, you can't help feeling that Jean-Pierre Léaud is little more than a superfluous guest artiste, a sliver of mouth-scorching chilli carelessly thrown into a dish to pep it up a little. But when Providence puts him in the way of a film director who can engage with him, as fully as Truffaut did on Les 400 coups, or Rivette did on Out 1, some great art can result.

Filmography

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