Unforgettable in “Breathless”, “Bebel”, one of the last monsters of French cinema, died on Monday at the age of 88. He was one of the greatest names in French cinema. The actor Jean-Paul Belmondo died this Monday, September 6, 2021 at the age of 88, his lawyer announced.
The actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, a sacred monster of French cinema, died Monday at his home in Paris at the age of 88, his lawyer told AFP “He was very tired for some time. He passed away quietly,” his lawyer Michel Godest said.
With his devil-may-care charm, Belmondo was the poster boy of the New Wave, France’s James Dean and Humphrey Bogart rolled into one irresistible man. With his boxer’s physique and broken nose, his restless insouciance chimed with the mould-breaking French cinema of the 1960s.
Director Jean-Luc Godard, the New Wave’s brilliant enfant terrible, cast Belmondo in his break-out role as a doomed thug who falls in love with the Jean Seberg’s pixie-like American in Paris in “Breathless” (1961).
The film floored critics and audiences worldwide and, with Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”, changed the history of cinema.
Time magazine in 1964 declared Belmondo the face of modern France.
“The Tricolour, a snifter of cognac, a flaring hem – these have been demoted to secondary symbols of France,” it said.
“The primary symbol is an image of a young man slouching in a cafe chair… he is Jean-Paul Belmondo — the natural son of the Existentialist conception, standing for everything and nothing at 738 mph.”
Yet Belmondo was far from a sauve intellectual and spent most of his career in he-man roles that played on his raw sex appeal.
Despite making his name as a charming gangster, the actor was brought up in the bourgeois Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the son of a renowned sculptor, Paul Belmondo.
Born in 1933, he performed poorly at school during the war but was a talented boxer, winning three straight round-one knockouts in a brief amateur career. He then trained at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art.His first foray into cinema in 1957 in the forgettable comedy “On Foot, On Horse and On Wheels”, ended up on the cutting-room floor. But undeterred Belmondo went on to work with some of the most talented directors of his generation, making a trio of films with Godard, and then with Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Melville. Truffaut described him as “the most complete European actor” of his generation.
