Although you wouldn’t immediately describe him as ‘handsome’ in the classic sense of the word, with his big nose, fleshy lips and the bags under his eyes, French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who died today at the age of 88, was mischievous bravado and mischievous laugh, yet very attractive.
He had no shortage of female attention. He had relationships with Bond girl Ursula Andress and Italian actress Laura Antonelli, among others. With the dancer Natty Tardivel, who is more than thirty years younger, he had a daughter at the age of 70.
Belmondo grew up in a chic suburb of Paris as the son of the famous sculptor Paul Belmondo. He wanted to be a boxer when he was a boy and he succeeded. His career was short. He decided to stop when he saw in the mirror that his face was starting to change, he later said.
Nouvelle vague
He went to drama school when he was twenty and after graduating mainly acted in the theater. In 1959 he got his first major film role in the drama Á double tour by Claude Chabrol. The following year, he broke through as an actor starring in the drama À bout the souffle by Jean-Luc Godard, which is considered the first film in the nouvelle vague genre.
This innovative film style contrasted with the classic Hollywood style in which every effort was made to make the viewer believe that everything was real. Nouvelle vague made viewers constantly aware that they were watching a film. For example, by addressing the viewers and disrupting the continuity in the film. The music used was mostly jazz.
Belmondo became a favorite of nouvelle vague directors such as Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, but also worked with Italian filmmakers such as Vittorio de Sica, who pitted him against Sophia Loren in la ciociara (1960 and Mauro Bolognini who paired him with Claudia Cardinale a year later in La Viaccia. Of cartridge (1962) and L’Homme de Rio (1964), both directed by Philippe de Broca, he switched to more commercial films, especially comedies and action films.
Hollywood
His films also had success outside of France and Italy. Hollywood offers came, but Belmondo turned them down. He didn’t want to jeopardize his great success by speaking English instead of French.
“Every Frenchman dreams of making a western, of course, but America has a lot of good actors. I’m not showing false modesty, but why should they need me? I prefer the national film,” he said in an interview in Los Angeles Times.
Tintin
Belmondo liked Tintin comics, sports magazines and detective novels and preferred to make adventure films rather than intellectual films. “But with François Truffaut I would be willing to try,” he told the New York Times. And so it happened. In 1969 he was in Truffauts La sirene du Mississipic opposite Catherine Deneuve.
Inspired by the success Alain Delon had producing his own films, Belmondo also founded his own production company; Cerito Films (named after his grandmother, Rosina Cerrito). The first Cerito film was the black comedy dr. Popaul (1972), starring Belmondo and Mia Farrow.
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What intellectuals don’t like is success.
He also produced and starred in the crime film Stavisky (1974) and then made a series of purely commercial films, including the police film Peur sur la ville (1975). All big box office successes in France, but bad for his reputation.
“What intellectuals don’t like is success,” Belmondo told The New York Times in 1990. “Success is always looked down upon in France. Not by the public, but by intellectuals. If I’m naked in a movie, that’s fine for the intellectuals, but if I jump out of a helicopter, they think it’s terrible.”
Belmondo loved to make adventure films such as L’homme de Rio, of which you can watch the trailer below:
In the mid-eighties he started to focus more on stage and more serious film roles. This is how he stood in the theater with Keane and Cyrano de Bergerac and received it for his role in Claude Lelouch’s charming film Itineraire d’un enfant gâté (1988) his first and only César. Incidentally, he refused the prize, because the maker of the figurine had spoken negatively about his father’s work.
In 2001 he suffered a stroke and disappeared from publicity for several years. Seven years later, he returned to the big screen in the drama Un homme et son chien by Francis Huster. In 2011, he received a Palm of Honor at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2016 an honorary Gold Lion in Venice and a year later he was honored with a prolonged ovation at the Césars ceremony.
In recent years he stopped making films, but still appeared regularly in the publicity, still with that irresistible, mischievous smile.