In Bertrand Tavernier's film, he played the young Duke de Guise, a man with a cloak and sword and what used to be called brio - a special kind of charm that turned slightly aggressive and went well with this story, in which not only Lovers sought and failed, but also Catholics and Huguenots, enemies of the king and those loyal to the king went at each other's throats.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Gaspard Ulliel was twenty-five and already famous since Jean-Pierre Jeunet had discovered him for his war drama "Mathilde - Eine Große Liebe". At Jeunet he was the missing fiancé of Audrey Tautou aka Mathilde, a victim of the First World War trenches and the inhumane machinery that kept that war alive, and the way he portrayed this shell-shocked boy he held the ending of the story just the right balance between tragedy and happy ending.

You don't learn this balance at acting schools, it's a question of instinct and inner attitude. So it's probably no coincidence that Ulliel was already in his 20s and early 30s playing complex and complex characters: the young Hannibal Lecter in Peter Webber's Silence of the Lambs prequel Hannibal Rising; the returnee Louis, who still can't find his way back to his family, in Xavier Dolan's "Simply the End of the World"; the fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent, who tries to overcome his creative crisis with drugs and sex, in Bertrand Bonello's "Saint Laurent"; or a shadowy callboy who appropriates the work of a deceased writer and finds his match in a colleague played by Isabelle Huppert in Benoît Jacquot's Hadley Chase film adaptation of Eve.

The prominent scar on his left cheek, which gave his face an early touch of maturity and brokenness, was left by Ulliel at the age of six after a Doberman Pinscher bite attack.

He wore it like an award: so you could recognize him in every role.

He had his last big appearance in the French mini-series "Il était une seconde fois", in which he played a man who can slip back into his own past through a wooden box.

There will no longer be a reunion with Gaspard Ulliel in the cinema: on Wednesday he died in Grenoble as a result of an injury he sustained in a skiing accident in the French Alps.

He was only 37 years old.