Death of Michel Piccoli, popular actor and against the tide

Text by: Christophe Carmarans

Died this Monday May 18 at the age of 94, Michel Piccoli will have led an incredibly rich career in cinema and theater. At the same time renowned and secret, he always fled the star system and favored the opposite, not hesitating to break his image on the stage as on the screen. A monument is gone.

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Perhaps it came from baldness, early. Or the bushy eyebrow. Or of the look, penetrating. Unless it was a smile, mischievous. Or even its 1.82 m, size rather uncommon in those born before the war. The fact remains that Michel Piccoli, who died today at the age of 94, has always kept his share of mystery. It is a charming asset for each man and a precious quality for any actor.

This immense actor was one of those, very rare, who instantly give depth and weight to the roles they take on. And God knows if there were any, roles. By examining your filmography, you are both dizzy and also emotional because nostalgia is never far away, of course. Vertigo in front of the parade of directors with whom he worked. Emotion when the film of his films pass before our eyes, as in The Things of Life , works all more emblematic of each other than the eras they have marked.

Over 200 films

Renoir, Melville, Godard, Buñuel, Ferreri, Resnais, Hitchcock, Chabrol, Costa-Gavras, De Broca, Boisset, Rivette, Sautet, Tavernier, Malle, Cavalier, Ruiz, Varda, Demy, Lelouch, De Oliveira, Miller, Moretti, Carax, to name only the main ones… who else, in all of French cinema, can boast of having been directed by such a plethora of directors? This immense career, more than 200 films, however took time to take off. It is indeed at 38 years old, in Le Mépris(1963), the masterpiece of Jean-Luc Godard, that Piccoli really reveals himself, when he has already participated in over sixty films and TV movies. And it was at 40, after Dom Juan or the feast of Pierre (1965) by Marcel Bluwal, on television, that he became truly famous, during the time of the ORTF.

In a short time, he will therefore become one of the major actors of European cinema, reaching all audiences, that of Luis Buñuel as that of Claude Sautet, that of the so-called intellectual cinema and that of the so-called popular cinema , a distinction that 'he has always challenged himself forcefully. “  I move on rails but I love that the loco makes detours. Straight lines annoy me  ”he confided to Télérama in 2001. Always on the go to break his image, he sometimes went very far in transgression as in La Grande bouffe (1973), one of his six films before the flap by Marco Ferreri.

At his best in the roles of subversive manipulators as in those of bourgeois in existential crisis, he excelled in particular in Buñuel, his favorite director, a collaboration that will span ten years and six films, as with Ferreri, of the Journal d 'a maid (1964) to the Phantom of Liberty (1974). “  An actor and a filmmaker are two people who constantly watch each other. I'm working with a director to understand why he chose me and how far he allows me to go in his utmost secrecy,  ”he said about his collaboration with the Hispanic-Mexican filmmaker.

Michel Piccoli evokes the filming of "Contempt"

Under the direction of Claude Sautet, four films in common, including two - Les Choses de la Vie (1970) and  Max et les ferrailleurs (1971) - with Romy Schneider as partner, Piccoli reaches heights of popularity, but rejects the star system . “  I have never refused to be a star. But I never wanted to become a star  ”, he confided in this same interview to Télérama. "  When I saw that there was a recipe that appealed ," he continued, " it made me want to change it. I have always looked for other worlds  . ” Winner of an Interpretation Prize at Cannes for Le Saut dans le vide (1980), he has been nominated four times for the Césars - Une Etrange Affair (1982), La Diagonale du Fou (1985), Milou in May (1989) and La Belle noiseuse (1992) - without ever taking it away, which should not have deprived him of sleep much.

Refusal of the star system

Between 1974 and 1994, Michel Piccoli often made five films a year, sometimes up to eight, which from the 1980s did not prevent him from returning to the theater where he had started in 1945, at 20 years old. We then see him playing both the classical repertoire in Phèdre (Racine), La Fausse suivant (Marivaux), Le Conte d'hiver (Shakespeare), La Cerisaie (Tchékhov) as well as risking himself in contemporary creations like Combat de Nègre dogs and The Return to the Desert (Koltès), Terre Etrangère (Schnitzler) or  La Maladie de la mort (Duras).

Never satiated, even if he slows down a little bit with age, he triumphs two seasons in a row at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris in Le Roi Lear at more than 80 years old, a role he had several times refused since 1993 and which earned him two Molière nominations in 2006 and 2007. As he approached his 90th birthday, cinema always made a fuss and we saw him again, excellent, pope caught by doubt in Habemus Papam by Nanni Moretti then with a less significant role in Holy Motors by Leos Carax, two films which still sate his taste for nonconformism and which are both presented in official selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 for Moretti and 2012 for Carax.

Engaged on the left throughout his life but disappointed, like many, by politics for the past fifteen years, Michel Piccoli came from an artistic and bourgeois background. Born on December 27, 1925 in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, he had musical parents: father of Italian origin and violinist, heiress of wealthy industrialists and pianist at the Concerts Colonne. The management of his maternal grandparents' paint factory was promised to him, but he always wanted to flee this bourgeoisie that he has so well embodied in some of his roles on the big screen.

Old enough to have known the exodus in 1940, he had kept from this period the exalted memory of a journey from Orleans to Tulle (more than 300 km note) made by bicycle to find his refugee parents with an aunt, an adventure that he detailed in his autobiography Selfish Dialogues : " I crossed cities and villages where the drama was a matter of adults, living for my part the two happiest days of my young life  (...) I weaved my way, without fatigue, in the midst of people who were crying and treading water. I clung to military trucks that turned their backs on the front. Unconsciousness gave me wings. Orléans-Tulle, in two days. " An experience which only reinforced his absolute desire for freedom.

Father of a daughter, Anne-Cordélia, whom he had from his first marriage with the actress of theater Eléonore Hirt in 1954, Michel Piccoli then married Juliette Gréco in 1967, a union between two sacred monsters which lasted ten years. He married screenwriter Ludivine Clerc in 1980, with whom he adopted two now adult Polish children, Missia and Inord. Later, the immense actor had passed three times behind the camera with So there you go , (1997), La Plage noire (2001) and C'est pas tout la vie which I had dreamed of (2005), three very personal works that had not found their audience or the favor of critics.

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