Actor who became a legend of the French new wave
Jean-Louis Trintignant 1930-2022
Jean-Louis Trintignant, who has died aged 91, was a legend of 20th century French cinema. An actor of “understated magnetism”, said The Washington Post, he shot to fame in 1956 when he appeared in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman – the film, set in St Tropez, that propelled Brigitte Bardot to overnight stardom. Trintignant didn’t have the roguish charm of Jean-Paul Belmondo, nor the prettiness of Alain Delon, but there was a sense of something lurking under his ordinary, rather blank good looks; and to the viewing public, that was borne out when he had a passionate off-screen affair with Bardot that ended both their marriages. Such was the furore, Trintignant entered military service to get away from it.
Jean-Louis Trintignant was born in Piolenc, in southeastern France, in 1930, the son of a wealthy industrialist. As a child, his ambition was to become a racing driver, like two of his uncles. Later, he thought to become a theatre director. He started acting to help him overcome his shyness, but he was soon winning professional roles, which led to And God Created Woman.
His career then went on hold, while he served with the army in Algiers. He hated his time there so much, he came home a wreck. But in 1959, Vadim magnanimously handed him a lifeline, by casting him in his new wave updating of Les Liaisons dangereuses, said The Guardian. For the next few years, Trintignant was rarely off the screen. He won international recognition when he starred in 1966’s Un Homme et une Femme. He followed it up with roles in acclaimed films including Éric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. He turned down Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, because he hated nudity and was embarrassed by sex scenes. He also turned down a role in Apocalypse Now, said The Daily Telegraph; by then he had bought a medieval house in Uzès, in southern France, and preferred to stay there, riding his motorbike and collecting mushrooms in the forest. He did sometimes re-emerge, however. Stanley Kubrick, for instance, persuaded him to dub Jack Nicholson’s role in The Shining (in France, his line “Coucou chérie!” is as well known as Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny!”); he also accepted a role in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “masterpiece” Three Colours Red (1994).
By then, he’d already experienced one tragedy: the cot death in 1969 of one of his two daughters with his second wife, Nadine Marquand. In 2003, he suffered another, when their other daughter, the actress Marie Trintignant, was beaten to death by her rock musician boyfriend, in a case that made global headlines. “It completely destroyed me,” he said later. After that, he poured himself into his work, and enjoyed a late-life success in 2013, when he won a best actor César for his role in the drama Amour. He is survived by his third wife, Marianne Hoepfner, and by his son.