Paris (AFP)

His name appears in the credits of some 1,400 films, feature films, clips and commercials, and he has doubled huge stars: Rémy Julienne, who died at the age of 90, was the most famous of French stuntmen.

His filmography includes six James Bonds, (from "Nothing for your eyes" in 1981 to "Goldeneye" in 1995), but also classics of French cinema: "Le Mur de l'Atlantique" (Marcel Camus), "Le Solitaire "(Jacques Deray)," Le Cerveau "(Gérard Oury)," Adventure is adventure "(Claude Lelouch).

He is also in the credits of "La Grande Vadrouille", by the same Gérard Oury, with Louis de Funès: the German biker "who takes a pumpkin in the face", it is him.

The career of Rémy Julienne, born in 1930 in Loiret, began in 1964, when another stuntman, Gil Delamare, offered him to participate in the filming of Fantômas.

"I was the French motorcycle champion and you needed someone very precise" to drive a motorcycle and overtake Jean Marais.

"It fell on me," he said willingly.

"It's the start of a great adventure," said the man who has worked with the greatest directors - François Truffaut, Leos Carax, Dino Risi, Terence Young or Sydney Pollack in particular - and the greatest actors.

He dubbed Yves Montand, Alain Delon, Roger Moore or Sean Connery among others.

But his fondest memory remains the meeting with the Belmondo-Lautner tandem.

For these two, Julienne will develop one of the most spectacular stunts, in "Le Guignolo": the actor will fly over Venice suspended from a trapeze hanging from a helicopter.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, "it is he who gave me the most of his confidence," he told AFP at 87, his eternal cap screwed to his head.

With this other crazy stuntman, whom he will find on the sets 14 times, "we had to improve".

- To the nearest second -

"What interests me is having fun, but you have to be credible" in "bullshit that becomes something useful", said Rémy Julienne, quoting Lautner.

Among its feats, a tanker truck rolling in balance on its left wheels in "License to Kill", a James Bond with Timothy Dalton, or a sedan which, from a springboard, takes off in the air before falling back on the roof of a bus, in "Dangerously yours", another James Bond.

Credibility, precision, rigor: these words kept coming back to Julienne, whose life in front of the camera, or that of her teammates, was regulated to the millimeter, to the nearest second.

Otherwise, "it's up there in a tree crate."

"Sometimes it would have taken little for that to happen", said this man marked by the death of a cameraman during a stunt on the set of the film "Taxi 2" in 1999, which he supervised.

Was he afraid?

"Fear is necessary before and after, but never during".

Otherwise, "we cannot make the right gesture at the right moment", answered this "reasonable madman", to use the words of Claude Lelouch.

Tireless, despite several infarcts and cancers, he passed the torch to his sons and grandsons, but continued, at over 80, to work for theme parks.

In 2017, he entrusted his personal archives to the Toulouse film library.

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