Beautiful women, fast cars, elegant suits, exotic countries, happiness, glamor, wealth and fame: this is how the cinema viewer imagines the life of a male film star in the twentieth century.

And Jean-Paul Belmondo had it all.

At a time when the stars on the street were not chased by passers-by with smartphones, but only by professional paparazzi and social networks still met in bistros and restaurants, Belmondo has tasted all the sweetness of a life like success on the screen to those chosen by the audience.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

He was in a relationship with the sex symbol Ursula Andress, he stood in front of the camera with Romy Schneider, Jean Seberg, Claudia Cardinale, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Sophie Marceau, he shot in the Caribbean and above the rooftops of Paris, and he did not give himself up only the image of a daredevil, but also lived by it.

He played most of his stunt scenes himself. In a film still from Philippe de Broca's "Adventure in Rio" you can see him balancing on a wooden beam a hundred meters above the buildings in the test-tube city of Brasilia.

The fact that the world was at Belmondo's feet was not just a slogan, but a cinematic reality.

“These thousand lives have passed too quickly, far too quickly - at the pace at which I used to drive sports cars.” This is how Belmondo's autobiography from 2016 begins, and he has the same thirst for experience, the same lust for existence that this sentence speaks of also lived through his acting career. Born in a suburb of Paris in 1933, he grew up in an environment that was just liberating itself from the shadows of World War II. His father, a sculptor, and his mother, who had worked as a dancer, supported his acting ambitions, while his brother, who went into the cinema industry as a production manager, later made Belmondo's films. Still, the young actor's beginnings were arduous. You could see on his face that he had already taken a lot as a boxer,and even his large mouth did not correspond to the current ideal of beauty, which is characterized by male hardness.

That this very mouth and the crushed nose would become the trademark of a star was clear at the latest when Belmondo appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's feature film debut from 1960. Godard had previously made a short film with Belmondo, and when he hired him for “Out of Breath” he only gave it four sentences instead of a script. "It's about a guy who is currently in Marseille ... In the end either he dies himself or he kills the girl who will see." That was enough to make Belmondo the face of a new era. The boyish mannerisms he developed for “Out of Breath”, the curses and sayings, the opening of the eyes, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth shaped his game to the end, and you only have to think of how he felt himself in a Humphrey Bogart imitation stroking the lip with the thumb,to see him again immediately. If Alain Delon, his friend and competitor, was the ice-cold angel of French cinema, then Belmondo is the immortal Filou.

After this start, Belmondo's career was on track. In doing so, he always drove in two directions: here auteur films, there mainstream films, here “A woman is a woman”, “Pierrot le Fou”, “The millions of a hunted one”, “The secret of the false bride” and “Stavisky”, there “ The panther is chased ”,“ Cartouche, the bandit ”,“ Borsalino ”,“ The mastermind ”,“ The gripper ”,“ The professional ”and“ The professional 2 ”. In doing so, Belmondo showed an admirable indifference to the distinction between artistic and commercial cinema. For him, film work was a matter of professional friendship. He wanted to have fun on the set, and so he chose his projects based on whether they would bring him together with the people he had known since drama school: Jean Rochefort, Annie Girardot, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Pierre Marielle and many others other.

Maybe that's why Belmondo never dared to make the leap to Hollywood. The millions of offers from the big studios could not lure him because he was rooted in the French film industry, its language, its rituals, its taboos. He always despised the cynical speculation with violent fantasies that arose in American cinema in the 1970s. So it happens that Belmondo, although internationally known, never received an Oscar. In 2011 he received the Palme d'Or in Cannes and the Golden Lion in Venice in 2016 for his life's work. His career was long over by then. A stroke paralyzed him in 2001, and his last appearance in a feature film was in 2008. He has now died in Paris at the age of eighty-eight.

"While I am telling you about my path, I notice how much I loved it, how happy, crazy and varied it was, full of friendship and love." Perhaps there is nothing better to say about the life of an actor. Because the Frenchman with the ageless boy face was also a friend for cinema viewers - and he will stay that way.