French actor Michael Lonsdale died this Monday in Paris at the age of 89
after a life dedicated to cinema with such unforgettable roles as the villain Hugo Drax
in the James Bond saga, although he also worked with Orson Welles, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg or Alejandro Amenábar.
The interpreter, born in the French capital in 1931, died at his home in Paris, his family reported to the weekly magazine
L'Obs
.
After a childhood in Morocco, Lonsdale began working in the theater in the 1950s, although it did not take long for him to enter the cinema,
where he starred in major international productions such as
Moonraker
, from the James Bond film saga, or
The Name of the Rose
by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
As the son of an Englishman, his bilingualism
allowed him to work interchangeably in both languages
, which undoubtedly helped propel his career.
The first time he came before the camera was in 1962 with Orson Welles in
The Trial
, where he played a priest in the adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel with Anthony Perkins and Romy Schneider.
He also acted in films such as
Is Paris Burning ?,
by René Clement,
El fantasma de la libertad
, by Buñuel,
Munich
, by Spielberg, or
De Dios y Hombres
, by Xavier Beauvois, a film that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Festival de Cannes cinema.
In 2009 he played Theón in
Ágora
, by Amenábar, father of Hipatia de Alejandría, the protagonist who played the actress Rachel Weisz.
He culminated his long film career in 2012
with
Gebo y la sombra
, by Manoel de Oliveira, with Jeanne Moreau and Claudia Cardinale.
"Accomplice of the vanguards"
The newspaper
Le Monde
highlights him as an
"irreducible accomplice of the avant-garde and contemporary authors
, whose appearance on billboard hits also allowed him to become a well-known face of the general public."
In the theater he worked under the direction of Claude Régy in 18 plays in which he interpreted texts by Marguerite Duras, Peter Handke or Luigi Pirandello.
The encounter with Duras led to further collaboration, and
Lonsdale later participated in three of his films
,
Détruire, dit-elle
,
Jaune le soleil
and
India song.
On several occasions he assumed ecclesiastical roles without hiding his own Catholic devotion, which led him in 2002 to give up playing a bishop in the
Costa-Gavras
film
Amen
, due to his well-known anti-Pope stance.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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