Michel Bouquet

Biography: life and films

Through a career that spans almost seventy years and includes over one hundred screen roles, Michel Bouquet has earned his reputation as one of France's most distinguished character actors, well regarded for his subtle portrayal of complex villains and solitary individuals living behind an implacable mask. He was born in Paris on 6th November 1925 and made up his mind at an early age that he would become an actor (having taken on a wide variety of odd jobs that include being a warehouse worker and bank delivery man). After studying drama under Maurice Escande of the Comédie-Française, he attended the Paris Conservatoire and embarked on a promising stage career, becoming the favourite actor of the great playwright Jean Anouilh.

Bouquet made his film debut in 1947 in two very different roles, first a killer in Gilbert Gil's routine crime drama Brigade criminelle (1947), then as a wretch suffering from tuberculosis in Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent (1947). Over the next two decades, he would continue appearing in minor roles in films by some of France's most prominent directors, including Henri-Georges Clouzot (Manon, 1949), Jean Grémillon (Pattes blanches, 1949), Abel Gance (La Tour de Nesle, 1955) and Jean Delannoy (Les Amitiés particulières, 1964). In the mid-1960s, his career was given a boost when he fell in with some of the leading directors of the French New Wave, including François Truffaut, who made good use of his talents in La Mariée était en Noir (1967) and La Sirène du Mississippi (1969).

Bouquet began his long association with director Claude Chabrol on a film that is atypical for both of them, the lowbrow spy thriller Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1965). After the disaster that was La Route de Corinthe (1967), Chabrol cast Bouquet in one of his most memorable screen roles, as Stéphane Audran's jealous husband in La Femme infidèle (1969). Bouquet and Audran reprised their roles as husband and wife in another notable Chabrol thriller, Juste avant la nuit (1971). By this time, Michel Bouquet had acquired his reputation for playing bourgeois villains which would serve him in good stead for the rest of his career. Bouquet was at his villainous best as the ruthless Inspector Javert in Robert Hossein's lavish production of Les Misérables (1982), strikingly reminiscent of his previous policier portrayal in José Giovanni's Deux hommes dans la ville (1973), in which he hounds a suspected murderer (Alain Delon) to his death.

From the early 1980s, Michel Bouquet devoted less of his time to cinema so that he could concentrate on his first love, the theatre. The Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael lured him back to cinema with a made-to-measure role in Toto le héros (1991), in which Bouquet turns in one of his finest performances as a dying man trying to reconstruct his past. Having taken the lead in Roger Guillot's La Joie de vivre (1993), one of his few comedic roles, Bouquet again turned his back on cinema, returning in 2001 as the lead in Anne Fontaine's Comment j'ai tué mon père (2001), winning his first Best Actor César for his efforts. His next attempt at comedy, forming a double act with Philippe Noiret in Bertrand Blier's Les Côtelettes (2003), did not go down well, but his portrayal of the former French president François Mitterand in Robert Guédiguian's Le Promeneur du champ de Mars (2005) garnered widespread acclaim and won him another Best Actor César. More recently, Bouquet received praise for his portrayal of the painter Auguste Renoir in Gilles Bourdos's Renoir (2012), turning in a remarkably sprightly performance for an actor in his late-80s.

Filmography

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