A final tribute was to be paid, at the Hôtel national des Invalides, to Michel Bouquet, a figure in French cinema and theater, who died on April 13. 

President Emmanuel Macron will deliver the eulogy in memory of the comedian at the end of the afternoon.

It will follow speeches by Fabrice Luchini, Muriel Robin, who was a pupil of Michel Bouquet at the Conservatoire, and Pierre Arditi.

The ceremony, which was to begin at 4 p.m., will be open to the public, in the presence of the family and relatives of the actor.

A giant of the stage

Unforgettable in "The King is Dying" by Ionesco - which he played no less than 800 times - and in "L'Avare" by Molière, Michel Bouquet died on April 13 after more than 75 years of career.

He had also marked the cinema by embodying an astonishing Mitterrand on the evening of his life in "Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars", by Robert Guédiguian (2005). 

This role earned him the César for best actor, after that received a few years earlier for Anne Fontaine's film "How I Killed My Father" (2002).

On screen, he also played secret characters in Claude Chabrol's films ("The Unfaithful Woman" in 1969, "Chicken in Vinegar" in 1985), played under the direction of François Truffaut ("The Bride Was in Black " in 1967, and "La Sirène du Mississippi" in 1968) and was a masterful Javert, the inspector chasing Jean Valjean in "Les Misérables" by Robert Hossein (1982).

But it was for the theater that this giant of the stage showed his preference, making known in France the work of Harold Pinter and putting himself at the service of great classical texts (Molière, Diderot or Strindberg) and contemporary (Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus or Thomas Bernhard).

With AFP

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