The reason for his death, which occurred in a Paris hospital, was not communicated by his family, his agent Sébastien Perrolat told AFP on Thursday.

André Wilms had agreed to several upcoming engagements, he said.

Actor of theater and cinema, director on the boards, André Wilms made himself known to the general public by playing Mr. Le Quesnoy in "Life is a long quiet river" (1988), by Étienne Chatiliez.

His character is a senior executive who addresses his wife and is addressed by his five children.

"If you drink cold right after the hot soup, it will blow up the enamel of your teeth, Emmanuelle", he explains for example.

Then he was appreciated by moviegoers thanks to the tragicomic films of Aki Kaurismäki.

Together they shot "La Vie de bohème" (1992), "The Leningrad Cowboys meet Moïse" (1994), "Juha" (1999), "Le Havre" (2011), presented at the Cannes Film Festival, "L'Autre Side of Hope" (2017).

Films marked by poetic dialogues, with a certain tenderness for its characters.

In "Le Havre", André Wilms was thus a shoe shiner, who held out his hand to a young African without papers.

"The Other Side of Hope" orchestrated the meeting between a Syrian migrant stranded against his will in the Finnish grayness and a restaurant owner separated from his alcoholic wife.

"The mouths evolve"

André Wilms laughed when asked about the operation of a set whose boss does not speak the language: "Great directors don't need to talk! He would say to me: +Play like an old gentleman . Don't run. Don't spill anything+... Everybody's running in movies these days."

"Aki is one of the rare directors who does not take the actors for illiterates, although there are many of them", he said again.

André Wilms at the Angouleme film festival on August 27, 2017 Yohan BONNET AFP / Archives

André Wilms has always been wary of the vagaries of fame.

Born in 1947 in Strasbourg, where he obtained a plasterer's CAP, he left his hometown for Toulouse.

Having become a machinist in a theatre, he was then tempted to step onto the stage.

He achieves this as an extra.

"I was always put in the roles of Nazis, because I spoke good German," he recalled.

This mastery of the language of Goethe will serve him when he goes to Paris and lands a role in a "Faust" directed by Klaus Michael Grüber.

"It's the time that imposes the actors (...) Belmondo, everyone found him ugly. Depardieu, it was said that he was a young first agriculturalist. And so I believe that the faces evolve with the time “, he noted.

"I would like to say that I am not responsible for my face".

In his youth, he was involved in the Proletarian Left, a Maoist organization of the early 1970s. "We were looking for this utopia, desperately (...) so we hoped in the Chinese Revolution (...) Everything it collapsed. I have a few comrades, there are some who committed suicide, others who became mute. I believed in it, really. I even believed that the theater could change, "he explained .

He is to appear one last time on the screen in Patrice Leconte's "Maigret", which will be released on February 23.

© 2022 AFP