Raymond Pellegrin

Biography: life and films

Raymond Pellegrin was born in Nice, in the south of France, on 1st January 1925. His real name is Raymond Pellegrini. Having completed his drama course, he began a busy stage career in the mid-1940s, appearing in productions of Marcel Pagnol's Topaze and Léopold Marchand's Balthazar. Concurrently, he began appearing in films, his first notable roles being in Jacques de Baroncelli's Marie la Misère (1945) and Marcel Pagnol's Naïs (1945). Raymond Pellegrin's skill as an actor endeared him to some distinguished filmmakers, including André Cayatte (Nous sommes tous des assassins, 1952), Henri Verneuil (Le Fruit défendu, 1952), Marcel Pagnol (Manon des sources, 1953), Henri Decoin (Les Intrigantes, 1954) and Robert Siodmak (Le Grand jeu, 1954). Sacha Guitry chose him to play the older Bonaparte in his lavish historical epic Napoléon (1955). The American director Nicolas Ray gave him his first English-speaking role in Bitter Victory (1957), although Pellegrin's repeated attempts to break into Hollywood ultimately came to nothing.

Pellegrin's most famous screen credit is for a series of films in which he did not even appear on screen. With his deep, seductive voice, who better to dub Jean Marais as the archest of arch-criminals, in André Hunebelle's popular Fantômas (1964) and its two sequels? By this stage in his career, Pellegrin was struggling to find roles worthy of his talents, although Jean-Pierre Melville gave him a memorable part in Le Deuxième souffle (1966). For the next decade, he would be relegated to low budget productions, including several misfires in Italy. As his career declined in the 70s and 80s, he occasionally found work with reputable filmmakers, including Yves Boisset (Le Saut de l'ange, 1971) and Claude Lelouch (Les Uns et les autres, 1981).

From the mid-1980s, television gave Pellegrin's career a new lease of life, with the actor frequently appearing in TV movies and series made in France and Italy - these included Le Triplé gagnant, which gave him one of his best-known roles as Commissaire Rocca. His final appearance was in the French television film Notes sur le rire (2002), based on a story by Marcel Pagnol, the man who helped to launch his career six decades previously. In a career that spanned almost sixty years, Raymond Pellegrin took on more than 130 screen roles. He died in Garons, France, on 14th October 2007, aged 82.

Filmography