Patrick Dewaere

Biography: life and films

Few would dispute that Patrick Dewaere was one of the finest actors of his generation, one of the few French actors who had the same rare combination of talent, courage, charisma and commitment which had previously distinguished the great American method actors. Dewaere brought an electrifying reality to every one of his screen portrayals with performances that were bold, subtle and profound, sometimes poignant, sometimes disturbing. His career spanned 31 years and includes appearances in 37 feature films, but it was only in his last decade that he came to prominence, in the roles for which he is now best remembered - stark and convincing portrayals of social outcasts, fragile loners or self-destructive romantics living at the extremity of their passions. It was a career most actors would envy, but it was also one that ended suddenly, in terribly tragic circumstances. In real life, Patrick Dewaere was a man who was as complex and mercurial as the characters he portrayed on screen.

Patrick Dewaere was born Patrick Jean-Marie Bourdeaux on 26th January 1947 in Saint-Brieuc in Britanny, in northwest France. The son of the actress Mado Maurin, he was the third of six children in a family of actors who regularly appeared on stage, on film, on television and on radio. He had little choice but to follow in his parents' profession and he made his film debut, aged four, under his original stage name Patrick Maurin, in the 1951 film Monsieur Fabre. The young Patrick had a difficult childhood and hated school, partly because he was teased for his early film roles. He joined Jacques Fabbri's theatre troupe in 1956 and proved to be a prodigious child actor. Over the next decade, he would take several small parts in a number of films, including H.G. Clouzot's Les Espions (1957) and René Clément's Paris brûle-t-il ? (1965).

Aged 17, the promising young actor was to suffer his first major personal crisis. He was shocked to discover that Pierre-Marie Bourdeaux was not his biological father; in fact he was the son of Michel Têtard, a conductor who died in 1960, aged 35 (curiously the same age at which Dewaere would himself die). Not only did he break away from his family, he also changed his stage name to Patrick de Waëre, adopting a form of the surname of his maternal grandmother, Devaëre. It was under this name that he appeared in the 1964 television series Les Hauts de Hurlevent (an adaptation of Wuthering Heights in which he played a young Heathcliff). Not long after this, the young actor adopted the professional surname Dewaere, the name by which he would become best known. The first film in which he was credited under this name was René Clément's La Maison sous les arbres (1971).

In 1967, Dewaere had a leading role in the French television series, Jean de la Tour Miracle, after which his adult acting career suddenly began to take off. In 1967, he joined Romain Bouteille's troupe at the Café de la Gare, a popular dinner theatre in Paris where he stayed for ten years and forged long-term relationships with many future stars of French cinema, including Coluche, who would become his closest friend, and Miou-Miou, with whom he would have an intense love affair. It was here that he met his first wife Sotha (Catherine Sigaux), to whom he was married from 1968 to 1979. Around this time, Dewaere began working as a voiceover artist, famously dubbing Dustin Hoffman in the French release of The Graduate. He also began to indulge in his second passion, music. In 1971, he recorded a single with Françoise Hardy, T'es pas poli. Dewaere's film career was still very much on the back burner, and the actor had to content himself with minor roles in such films as Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Les Mariés de l'an II (1971) and Claude Faraldo's Themroc (1973).

Patrick Dewaere's big breakthrough came in 1974, when he appeared alongside another star-in-the-making, Gérard Depardieu, in Bertrand Blier's hit anarchic comedy Les Valseuses. The film also featured Miou-Miou in her first important screen role and it was whilst making this film that she and Dewaere began their two-year long love affair, which gave Dewaere his first daughter, Angèle. The relationship ended in bitter acrimony when Miou-Miou fell in love with the singer Julien Clerc.

By the late 1970s, Patrick Dewaere had become a major star of French cinema, but the actor eschewed mainstream blockbusters (which might have brought him greater international renown) in favour of more modest auteur films, which allowed him to get to grips with far more complex and challenging characters. This was perhaps why he was more willing to work with inexperienced young film directors than established filmmakers. He took the lead in Claude Miller's debut feature La Meilleure façon de marcher (1975) and collaborated on early films by directors who are now held in great esteem - Alain Corneau (Série noire), Jean-Jacques Annaud (Coup de tête) and André Techiné (Hôtel des Amériques). He also worked with several established filmmakers, notably Yves Boisset (Le Juge Fayard dit le shériff), Claude Sautet (Un mauvais fils) and Philippe de Broca (Psy).

In 1980, Patrick Dewaere acquired instant notoriety when he violently assaulted the journalist and critic Patrice de Nussac, after the latter revealed intimate details about the actor's private life (his forthcoming marriage to Élisabeth Malvina Chalier, a.k.a. Elsa). So outraged was the press by this attack that they refused to mention his name in connection with his next film, Un mauvais fils. The incident was to impact on Dewaere's ability to find work. Increasingly, he found himself driven towards the fringe, away from bigger productions that may have made him as big a star as his closest contemporary, Gérard Depardieu, whose career had begun to skyrocket. Dewaere's reputation as an outsider is reinforced by the fact that whilst he was nominated six times for a César, he never once received the award.

It was in October 1980 that Patrick Dewaere married his second wife, Elsa, who would give him his second daughter, Lola. The marriage lasted less than two years and ended when Elsa left Dewaere to begin an affair with his best friend, Coluche. The break-up was to have a devastating impact on the actor, and his state of mind around this time is perhaps betrayed in his last film, Alain Jessua's Paradis pour tous (1982), in which he played a suicidal depressive. It was whilst he was working on his next film, Claude Lelouch's Edith et Marcel (in which he played the part of the ill-fated boxer Marcel Cerdan) that Dewaere's life reached its tragic conclusion. On the 16th July 1982, after a cordial morning meeting with his director, the actor returned to his home in Paris, picked up a rifle given to him by Coluche, and shot himself in the mouth. Dewaere left no note to explain his actions and for years his suicide remained a mystery. Recently, it has been revealed that shortly before he killed himself, the actor received a telephone call from his ex-wife Elsa (then staying in Guadeloupe with Coluche) telling him he would never see his daughter again. Dewaere was subsequently interred in the family vault at Saint-Lambert-du-Lattay cemetary in Maine-et-Loire.

Today, Patrick Dewaere remains one of the most revered of French actors. He is honoured by the Prix Patrick-Dewaere (a successor to the Prix Jean-Gabin), which is awarded each year to the most promising French actor. Recipients of the award to date include Louis Garrel (2009), Tahar Rahim (2010) and Gilles Lellouche (2011). In 1992, the journalist Marc Esposito made a documentary entitled simply Patrick Dewaere to mark the tenth anniversary of the actor's death, with heartfelt contributions from fellow actors, directors and friends. The Centre Patrick Dewaere was inaugurated in Lierneux, Belgium in 1995 to provide support for suicidal young adults, and in 2009 a walkway in the Parc des Promenades, in the actor's home town of Saint-Brieuc, was renamed Esplanade Patrick-Dewaere. Dewaere's adult film career was as brilliant as it was brief, a worthy contribution to France's fine tradition of auteur cinema and an inspiration for other talented young actors. His name will burn brightly for many years to come, in the celluloid in which he imparted so much of his own authenticity and zest for life.

Filmography

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