French actor was `an original' dramatist
Michel Bouquet, a prize-winning French actor who brought an understated magnetism to classic stage roles and New Wave films, often playing bourgeois characters whose respectable appearance masked a turbulently passionate inner life, died Wednesday at a hospital in Paris. He was 96.
His death was confirmed in a statement by the Élysée Palace, the office of French President Emmanuel Macron, which did not cite a cause. “For seven decades,” Macron said, “Michel Bouquet brought theatre and cinema to the highest degree of incandescence and truth, showing man in all his contradictions, with an intensity that burned the boards and burst the screen.”
Bouquet started out in the theatre, collaborating with playwrights such as Albert Camus and Jean Anouilh, before working with New Wave directors such as Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, who cast him as moody anti-heroes and in offbeat supporting roles where he was easily recognizable by his deep voice, glinting eyes and mischievous smile.
“He's a greatly original actor. Even if he has a very relaxed and smiling air, there's something in his acting that's disconcerting, destabilizing, that provokes strangeness all the time,” filmmaker Anne Fontaine said in a 2002 interview with the New York Times.
Bouquet starred the previous year in her film How I Killed My Father, winning a César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for his portrayal of an aging physician.
Bouquet appeared in nearly 120 film and television roles even as he remained active on the Paris stage, taking parts well into retirement age. He won the country's highest theatre award in 1998 and 2005.
Bouquet was born in Paris on Nov. 6, 1925. His father, a First World War veteran, was taken prisoner by the Germans during the Second World War and spent four years in captivity in Pomerania. His mother was a milliner who accompanied him to the Opéra-comique during the Nazi occupation, taking his mind off the conflict and revealing the power of the theatre.
“Each time the curtain rose, there was no longer the horror of war, there were no longer Germans around. ... The unreal world far exceeded the real world,” Bouquet told the news agency Agence France-presse. “It was the best lesson of my life.”