Robert Le Vigan

Biography: life and films

Robert Le Vigan was born Robert-Charles-Alexandre Coquillaud, on 7th January 1900, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, France, where his father worked as a veterinary surgeon. Rather than follow his father's profession, the young Robert opted instead to become an actor. He entered the Paris Conservatoire, but left without graduating when he realised he would never be awarded the first prize because of his military commitments. After completing his military service as an infantryman in the French zone of Wiesbaden, he began touring the provinces in theatre companies run by Gaston Baty and Louis Jouvet. From 1919, he enjoyed a busy stage career, appearing in productions of plays by Molière, George Bernard Shaw and Georges Courteline.

It was Le Vigan's performance in Jouvet's production of a Jules Romains play, Donogoo, in 1930 that led Julien Duvivier to give him his first screen role in Les Cinq gentlemen maudits (1931). Although Le Vigan was never star material Duvivier had an immense regard for him as an actor and would call upon his services in a further six films including La Bandera (1935) and La Charrette fantôme (1939). The most surprising role that Le Vigan received from Duvivier was that of Jesus Christ in his Biblical drama Golgotha (1935) - surprising because the actor's film repertoire consists mainly of outright villains, pathetic losers and terrifying lunatics. Le Vigan rewarded his director's faith in him with a portrayal of Christ that is nothing less than inspired.

Duvivier was not the only prominent French filmmaker of this time who appreciated Le Vigan's talents as a character actor. Jean Renoir cast him in two of his films, first as the vile extortionist Lheureux in Madame Bovary (1933), then as the alcoholic actor on a tragic decline in Les Bas-fonds (1936). Marcel Pagnol made use of his comedic skills as a contemptible authority figure in Regain (1937), and in Marcel Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938) Le Vigan plays on our sympathies with a devastating depiction of an artist at the end of his tether. The actor's penchant for the sinister and grotesque is more than apparent in Christian-Jaque's Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1938).

During the Nazi Occupation of France, Robert Le Vigan had absolutely no qualms about working for the German run company Continental, appearing as a colourful neurotic in Christian-Jaque's L'Assassinat du Père Noël (1941). He made no secret of his pro-Vichy feelings. He wrote a letter to the head of Continental, Alfred Greven, thanking him for the opportunity to participate in the 'new order' and even went as far as expressing his anti-Semitic views in a series of sketches broadcast by Radio-Paris. He made a habit of sending letters to the Gestapo denouncing his show business associates and in 1943, under the influence of his friend Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a well-known anti-Semite, he joined the Parti populaire français, a French fascist party led by Jacques Doriot.

Surpassing his screen villainy through his underhand real-life exploits, Le Vigan would later earn himself the reputation of one of the most flagrant Nazi collaborators of his profession. Meanwhile, he continued to be a highly sought-after and popular actor, and it was during the Occupation that he delivered his finest screen performance, as the totally unhinged Goupi Tonkin in Jacques Becker's atmospheric rural thriller Goupi Mains Rouges (1943). Knowing nothing of the actor's collaborationist tendencies, Marcel Carné gave him the role of Jéricho in Les Enfants du paradis, but had to replace him with Pierre Renoir when the actor quit the scene after hearing that the Allies had just landed in Italy.

When justice caught up with Robert Le Vigan it did so with a terrible and unforgiving swiftness. He managed to avoid the Épuration légale (legal purge) after the Liberation by fleeing to Germany with Céline, but he was arrested whilst trying to escape to Switzerland in March 1945. After being held in Fresnes prison, he was brought to trial in 1946 but, despite passionate appeals from his former colleagues (Duvivier, Jean-Louis Barrault, Louis Jouvet, and others), he was found guilty of collaboration. Stripped of his civic rights, he was spared the guillotine but was sentenced to ten years' hard labour. He was released after three years and went into exile, first in Spain, then in Argentina.

In 1951 and 1952, Le Vigan bowed out of cinema by appearing in five films in Argentina. His acting career now well and truly over, he managed to subsist by giving lessons in French and Greek and working as a taxi driver. He ended his life in destitution and ill-health, surviving by doing odd jobs and selling cakes in the streets. François Truffaut contacted him in the late 1960s to try to persuade him to return to France. But Le Vigan was in too poor a state of health, both physically and mentally, to go anywhere. The man who had once dazzled audiences with his screen portrayals, who had been the first actor to play Jesus Christ in a sound movie and had seventy film credits to his name died in obscurity in the Argentinean town of Tandil, on 12th October 1972, aged 72.

Filmography

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