French art-house actor Michel Piccoli dies aged 94
French actor Michel Piccoli, who worked with arthouse film directors such as Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle, has died from a stroke aged 94, according to his family on Monday. His long career saw him play a wide range of roles, one of which won him best actor at Cannes in 1980.
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From Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, to a playing opposite Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le Mépris) in 1963, Piccoli had a knack for becoming one with his roles.
"I do not put on an act... I slip away behind my characters. To be an actor you have to be flexible," Piccoli once said.
Tributes have been pouring in to a man who was able to combine humour, and edginess, a style which suited art-house and mainstream viewers alike.
🖤🖤🖤A legend has gone.
— UniFrance (@uniFrance) May 18, 2020
Cinema made man.
Farewell #MichelPiccoli. pic.twitter.com/1Td71T3Gm3
He was sometimes likened to a French Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper, actors who were handsome all-rounders.
Beginning his career in the 1940s, Piccoli went on to make over 170 movies, working into his late eighties.
He worked alongside some of the big names of cinema such as Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Britain’s Alfred Hitchcock, and appeared in such films as Michel Deville's Death in a French Garden (1985), and Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986).
Best actor at Cannes
One of the actor’s last major roles was in 2011's Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Yet despite his full career, Piccoli never won a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar, despite being nominated four times including for Louis Malle's Milou in May and Jacques Rivette's The Beautiful Troublemaker in 1991.
He did, however, win best actor at the Cannes film festival in 1980 for playing a tortured Italian judge in Marco Bellocchio's A Leap in the Dark and the following year shared best actor at Berlin for A Strange Affair.
One of his best known films outside France was Marco Ferreri's 1973 La Grande Bouffe (Blow-Out), in which a group of male friends shut themselves up in a house with prostitutes and try to eat themselves to death.
Outside of cinema, he was known for his left wing views and counted philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and John-Paul Sartre among his friends.
Piccoli was married three times: first to Eléonore Hirt, then to singer Juliette Gréco (until 1977), and to Ludivine Clerc, who survives him. He has three children; Inord and Missia and a daughter from his first marriage, Anne-Cordélia.
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