"He was an esteemed figure in French theater and a familiar face in our popular cinema", underlined the presidency in a press release on Sunday evening, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron welcoming "a man who had dedicated his life to the theater".
"Jacques Sereys served texts which, by their melancholy or their panache, their verve or their subtlety, said everything about a certain French spirit", continued the Elysée.
This Marsellanais born in 1928 and raised by his mother, an embroiderer, started in a small job at Crédit Lyonnais before landing in Paris in 1947, driven by his desire to become an actor.
"At nineteen, he read his classics, lost his accent and passed the Conservatory. From then on, he worked, read, learned", writes on his site the Comédie-Française which he joined in 1955 for 30 years.
"With a pronounced taste for intermittency", notes the House of Molière since he left the venerable institution in 1965 to finally join it in 1978 until 1997. He played a varied repertoire (Marivaux, Genet, Corneille, Goldoni or even Feydeau) and brought Giraudoux into the Comédie-Française.
His comrades are Jacques Charon, Robert Hirsch, Jean Piat and Françoise Seigner.
He made incursions into the cinema, notably with his role as head of the secret services opposite Yves Montand in "I… comme Icare" by Henri Verneuil (1979) and roles in "Le Feu foulet" and "Le Souffle au cœur by Louis Malle.
He had married Philippine de Rothschild, also an actress at the French who played under the name of Philippine Pascale, and with whom he had two children, Philippe and Camille.
© 2023 AFP