Paris (AFP)

Monument to French cinema, actor Michel Piccoli, famous for his roles in "Le contempt", "Things in life" or more recently "Habemus papam", died on May 12 at the age of 94, his family announced on Monday in a press release sent to AFP.

"Michel Piccoli died on May 12 in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his young children Inord and Missia, following a stroke," said this press release sent to AFP by Gilles Jacob, friend of the actor and former president of the Cannes Film Festival.

Revealed by "Le Mépris" by Godard (1963) where he formed a legendary couple with Brigitte Bardot, the actor has shown his seductive physique with bushy eyebrows in more than 150 films, from the provocateur of "La Grande Bouffe" to the pope. plagued by the doubt of "Habemus papam" (2011), his last big role on screen.

With a remarkable longevity, his career is inseparable from the films of Luis Buñuel and Claude Sautet.

Under the direction of the first, he interpreted troubled characters ("The diary of a chambermaid", "Belle de jour", "The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie") before becoming an incarnation of the glorious Thirty, immutable cigarette at the beak, at the second, in the 70s ("Things of life", "Max and the scrap dealers", "Vincent, François, Paul ... and the others").

Ecclectic in his choices, he also toured under the direction of Renoir, Resnais, Demy, Melville, Varda and Hitchcock.

Tall, dark, balding over the years, a thundering or bewitching voice, this enigmatic character, "enjoyed playing extravagance or the most disturbing delusions, breaking (his) image", he said, before to launch himself in the realization, at 70 years.

His role in "La Grande Bouffe" by Marco Ferreri, one of the biggest scandals at the Cannes Festival in 1973, is proof of this. He embodies a participant in a gastronomic seminar transforming into a scatological or nihilist orgy.

His refusal of career plans, his "anti-star" side also led him to shoot author films: Leos Carax, Jean-Claude Brisseau, Jacques Doillon.

In 1990, he camped greedily a character of a fantastic bourgeois in "Milou en mai" by Louis Malle.

Gradually disappeared from the screens, this great modesty, born in 1925 into a family of musicians, will lift a corner of the veil at over 90 years old in a book of interviews with his friend Gilles Jacob ("I lived in my dreams "). He confided his anguish at not being able to work anymore: "We would like it never to stop and it will stop (...) it's very difficult".

Four times nominated for the César, in particular for "La belle Noiseuse" by Jacques Rivette in 1992, he has never been awarded by the Academy.

© 2020 AFP