Jean-Louis Trintignant in a wheelchair letting himself be overwhelmed by the waves of a rough sea... The last scene that the French actor bequeathed to the cinema is not the most enchanted.
It is she who closes "Happy End", a poorly named film by Michael Haneke.
Jean-Louis Trintignant played a cantankerous and weakened patriarch there.
He was then 86 years old and knew he had cancer.
Despite a fragile state of health, the actor impressed.
By his look first of all, pitiless.
And especially his voice.
That beautiful voice that time and illness had failed to alter.
She finally died on Friday June 17, after having gone through more than 60 years of French cinema history.
Jean-Louis Trintignant's voice borrowed from the seventh art.
We have heard it in the greatest films, from the greatest directors.
François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Claude Lelouch, Jacques Audiard as far as the French are concerned.
Ettore Scola, Costa-Gavras, Bernardo Bertolucci, Krzysztof Kieślowski regarding European directors.
In the theater too, she carried the greatest texts, those of Shakespeare, Jean Giraudoux, Tennessee Williams, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon... For many children, now in their forties, this voice was also that of the narrator of the "Little Prince". , this famous tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry which was the subject of a vinyl recording in the early 1970s.
it was also long associated with the sinister mine of Jack Nicholson that the actor dubbed for the French version of the terrifying "Shining".
To film of international reputation, dubber of international reputation.
Because in the same way as Yves Montand, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo or even Gérard Depardieu, alongside whom - and not in whose shadow - he shaped an impressive filmography, Jean-Louis Trintignant enjoyed notoriety going beyond the hexagonal borders.
Most often unwillingly.
Discreet, mysterious, unfathomable artist, the actor never really ran on television sets, red carpets, magazine covers... "I was extremely shy. And then notoriety, that never interested me. . You know, it's fun the first time, but after that it's not at all. Why are we being given awards? We are already well paid, we better give Oscars to people who do not fun jobs, "
Distinctions, Jean-Louis Trintignant has nevertheless received.
César, Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival… But it was at Cannes that his acting destiny was most closely linked.
From the romance "A man and a woman" to the drama "Love", the famous festival has punctuated his life.
From Cannes 1966 to Cannes 2012, a look back at five key moments in the career of the actor with 160 roles.
And God…created a male and a female
When in 1966, he landed in Cannes where "A man and a woman" is in competition, Jean-Louis Trintignant is not really unknown.
Ten years earlier, the general public had discovered her face as a young first in "And God created woman", the scandalous film by Roger Vadim which propelled Brigitte Bardot to the height of stardom.
Off-screen, the two actors even had a short romance that caused a lot of ink to flow in the gossip press.
Subsequently called to the side of the French army, then engaged in Algeria, Jean-Louis Trintignant had temporarily disappeared from film sets.
His presence on the poster of Claude Lelouch's film is therefore a kind of international "comeback".
A winning "comeback" since "A man and a woman" received the Palme d'Or, then the Oscar for best foreign film.
At 36, Jean-Louis Trintignant established himself as one of the new faces of young French cinema.
• His night at Maud's
Three years after the success of "A man and a woman", Jean-Louis Trintignant is illustrated in two great films which will pass to posterity.
In "Z" by Costa-Gavras, he plays a troubled investigating judge of a disturbing military dictatorship (which earned him, by the way, the prize for male interpretation at Cannes).
In a completely different genre, Éric Rohmer offers him the role of a lover as inconstant as he is moralistic in the timeless intellectual marivaudage "My night at Maud's".
Silent in the first, talkative in the second, Jean-Louis Trintignant shines in all registers.
In fact, between 1960 and 1980, the actor toured a lot.
Not a year goes by without French cinema offering him major roles.
The actor is directed by all that the seventh art has of essential directors.
It is everywhere: historical fresco by René Clément ("Is Paris burning?"), experimental works by Alain Robbe-Grillet ("Trans-Europ Express"), bourgeois chronicle by Claude Chabrol ("Les Biches"), political film by Yves Boisset ("L'Attentat"), thrillers by Jacques Deray ("A man is dead", "Cop Story"), romantic comedy by Claude Berri ("I love you"), vaudeville farce by François Truffaut ("Vivement dimanche"), love dramas of Nadine Trintignant, his wife ("Mon amour, mon amour").
• Gian Luigi
In this golden age when cinema still erects footbridges over the Alps, Jean-Louis Trintignant works a lot in Italy.
Already in 1962, he was filming for Dino Risi who, with "Le Fanfaron", a masterpiece of Italian comedy, allowed him to play alongside the great Vittorio Gassman.
He even tries his hand at spaghetti westerns with "Le Grand Silence" by Sergio Corbucci.
But it was Bernardo Bertolucci who, in 1970, offered him his most outstanding role in the language of Dante.
In "The Conformist", he plays a professor of philosophy based on the fascist mold of the Mussolini dictatorship.
With this work straddling political satire and psychological drama, Jean-Louis Trintignant inscribes his name in the pantheon of European cinema.
• Poems to Mary
At the same time, he leads a career on the boards.
He plays classic texts ("Hamlet", "The Trojan War will not take place") as well as contemporary pieces, such as "Art" by Yasmine Reza, one of the greatest public successes of the 1990s, a decade during which he abandons the cinema for the stage.
It is at the theater, moreover, that he will most often give the reply to his daughter Marie.
In 1999, father and daughter create surprise – and trouble – by interpreting the "Poèmes à Lou", texts with a high erotic content by Guillaume Apollinaire.
In 2002, he will play one last with her.
At the cinema this time, with "Janis and John" by Samuel Benchetrit.
The following year, Marie Trintignant died under the blows of her companion, the singer of Noir Désir Bertrand Cantat.
Jean-Louis Trintignant, devastated, abandons the seventh art.
But, in homage to his deceased daughter, goes back on stage to interpret, alone, the verses of Apollinaire.
Give the example
After eight years of absence on the big screens, he lets himself be convinced by the Austrian director Michael Haneke to return to the cinema.
It will be for "Love", a drama in which he shares the poster with an actress as cult as him: Emmanuelle Riva.
This story of a couple in their eighties faced with the shipwreck of aging upsets the Cannes Film Festival when it is presented in competition.
By the admission of Nanni Moretti, the president of the jury at the time, the film won the 2012 Palme d'Or thanks, in part, to the performance of the duo.
During the award ceremony, Jean-Louis Trintignant declaimed by way of a speech a verse by Jacques Prévert which will remain as one of his most striking last lines: "And if we tried to be happy, if only to lead by example?
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