Paris (AFP)

Sacred monster on the screen, great modesty in life, the actor Michel Piccoli died at 94 years old, after a career of almost 60 years where he embodied darkly extravagant characters like seducers upset by "the things of life ".

With him, turns a page of French and even European cinema, as well as an era: that of the Thirty Glorious, films by Sautet and Buñuel, meals dragging on for hours and men chatting about fagging.

His gaze captured a few seconds before the car accident in "Things of life" (1970) by Claude Sautet was part of the photos widely relayed on social networks Monday, after the announcement of his death. As well as the one taken from "Mépris" - the film by Godard who revealed it in 1963 - where he is seated on the edge of the bathtub, hat on his head, alongside Brigitte Bardot.

The actor "died on May 12 in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his young children Inord and Missia, following a stroke," said his family on Monday.

"We interpreted the + Contempt +, but shared a great mutual esteem", reacted Brigitte Bardot. "The last spray of the + New wave + prevailed leaving me alone on the abandoned beach", she concluded in a press release sent to AFP.

"The immense actor he was doubled with a man so fraternal that I have great pain!", Affirmed on Twitter actor Pierre Richard, his partner in "La cavale des fous".

- "Magisterial presence" -

"All these years of cinema, the masterful presence of Michel Piccoli has accompanied us so well ... Great emptiness, immense sadness", paid tribute to the Cannes Film Festival, whose edition canceled due to coronavirus was to take place in this moment.

"We weren't directing Piccoli. We were filming him. It was useless to give him directions to the game. The character he interpreted guided him", reacted to AFP his friend Gilles Jacob. The former president of the Cannes Film Festival had written a book of interviews with the actor in 2015.

"+ Doing + has become more difficult with age and the memory that falters: I'm like a pen that has run out of ink, and I start to moan like crazy: + Where's my ink? +", confided the actor, absent from the screens since his participation in "Holy Motors" by Leos Carax and especially "Habemus Papam" (2011) by Nanni Moretti, his last big role, that of a pope in the grip of doubt.

"Magistral in Claude Sautet's cinema, Michel Piccoli was one of those immense actors whose gaze is enough to transport you. From cinema to theater, he impressed with the incredible accuracy of his acting", underlined the Minister of Culture Franck Riester on Twitter, also evoking his "commitment" on the left.

- "I don't care about roles" -

"Fiery and enthusiastic, he was in all humanist and social fights," added his predecessor Jack Lang, citing his fight for the undocumented and the intermittent of the show.

Culture assistant at the Paris City Hall, Christophe Girard saluted him the memory of a "unique and brilliant chameleon", which has appeared in more than 150 films, under the direction of Varda, Hitchcock, Costa-Gavras, Renoir, Buñuel, Melville, Demy or Chabrol ....

"When you play comedy, you have to manage to do things even sometimes the most extravagant but which may seem obvious", underlined again the one who liked to play provocation, in Buñuel ("Belle de jour", "Le journal d'une chambermaid ") like Marco Ferreri (" La grande bouffe "), which caused a scandal on the Croisette in 1973.

Interpretation Prize in Cannes for "The jump into the void" by Marco Bellochio in 1980, he was named four times to the César but never awarded. The Academy welcomed on Monday "a grandiose comedian, a meticulous worker, full of charm and elegance".

"He was a real sacred monster," said the statement. When asked what he thought of this expression, Michel Piccoli replied "monster I accept, sacred, that worries me a little. Let's say monster ... ellipsis".

© 2020 AFP