Actor Jean

Death, Jean-Louis Trintignant had learned to tame it: “When I sign autographs, as I no longer see much, it’s difficult but good, I sign “Jean-Louis Trintignant’ and I specify below “at the end of his life”. In May 2017, he confided to journalist Laurent Delahouse: “I never thought I was an exceptional guy because I made movies..”
And yet…

What a life ! What a filmography!
For twenty years, the actor had chosen to live in Uzès (Gard), only returning to the studios or the stage when he was passionate about a project. “Happy End” by Michael Haneke (released in France in October 2017) will therefore be his last film. This great lover of poetry will have traveled the roads of France until the beginning of the year to recite in always full rooms the authors who were close to his heart: Boris Vian, Alain Leprest, Robert Desnos: “At the end of the show, he saidI recite a poem from the Canadian Gaston Mironwith music by Piazzolla performed by accordionist Daniel Mille, and I dedicate it to my daughter Marie, who died fourteen years ago, with whom I played a lot on stage.”

A resilient father

The actor was born on December 11, 1930 in Piolenc (Vaucluse) from an industrial father, very marked on the left and from a fine and sensitive mother, very religious, able to recite by heart the tragedies of Racine or Corneille.

With his older brother, in very fragile health, he goes to mass every Sunday. The actor confides: It was a show that thrilled me. I was amazed at this preacher giving talks. I think that’s why I became an actor.” His father took to the maquis and set up a resistance network in the region. Wanted by the Gestapo, the Germans arrest his wife to make her talk.
To everyone’s amazement, she was soon released.
In fact, Claire, his mother, became the mistress of his jailer.
At the liberation, the hour of great jubilation is also the hour of settling scores. When his father returns from the maquis, haloed by his courageous past, the two children witness a terrible spectacle: ” My mother was in a cart, shaved, like all the women who had had affairs with Germans”.
The 14-year-old teenager will never forget the scene and, above all, he will remember the reaction of his father who, turning to him, asks: “But how could you let that happen?”.

My father was a concerned socialist

The years that follow are sad and reveal a depressive character in him. He will concede it to the newspaper Le Monde in June 2004: “I admit that I was never very cheerful! I had a fairly happy adolescence materially, my parents were nice petty bourgeois, but I had a very sad adolescence, I did not want to enter this life , I tried to kill myself, several times.

The saving words “Words” by Jacques Prévert

His salvation is precisely his mother, Claire, who will bring it to him. In 1946, she made him discover “Lyrics” by Jacques Prévert. It is glare. The words enchant him. It is therefore possible to play with it and to arouse emotions. He pretends to study law in Aix-en-Provence before becoming interested in the theater:“When I started, we talked about my air of being elsewhere. It came from my shyness. I came from the South, with my accent, my uneasiness, my fears…” In 1951, he starred in the play “To each according to his hunger” and “Limited Liability” in 1953: “The theater is above all the verb. The actor must make heard what the poet has thought, felt, written, without involving the slightest critical or moral sense. He must give the impression that he is improvising his words …”
But, against all expectations, it is the staging that fascinates him. He took classes at Idhec, the great film school of the time. His classmates are Louis Malle and Alain Cavalier: “I enrolled at the same time in a theater course. But I didn’t want to be an actor, I told myself that it would do me good when I became a director to know the problems of actors. More than in any discipline , the movie director is really the captain of the boat.”He will direct two films: “A full day” (1972) and “The lifeguard” (1978).
Success of esteem despite the obvious mastery of the staging and the choice of subjects soaked in black humor.
Finding the productions too heavy, too time-consuming and, a little scalded by this double failure, he will not repeat.

And Vadim created Bardot… and launched Trintignant

“And God created the woman”in 1956, revealed it to the general public.
Brigitte Bardot embodies Juliette, a free, maddening, feline, seductive young woman. She is coveted by three men and ends up marrying Michel, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. In the city, the future 21-year-old planetary star is married to the director, Roger Vadim27 years old.

An idyll is tied with his partner on the screen. “By dint of being natural in my love scenes with Jean-Louis, will she write in her memoirs I quite naturally end up loving it. I felt a devouring passion for himThe actor has also fallen in love with his irresistible partner. Bardot leaves Vadim some time after the end of filming and buys an apartment to house their affair. Scandal. The film is a huge success.

Here is the couple hunted down by the journalists. The media pressure is exhausting. They end up breaking up. Bardot will keep an intense memory of this liaison: “I loved Jean Lou madly, I loved him like I may never have loved again, but I didn’t know it, I was too young. ”

I prefer to take the risk of disappointing or being exceptional

But the “events in Algeria”, as they said modestly then, came to interrupt his artistic ascent.
His military service took him to Germany and then to Algeria.
On his return, he thinks of quitting the cinema and even becomes a photographer for the weekly the express during two years.

A man, a woman…. and Trintignant

He agrees to interpret Hamlet at the theater and finds Roger Vadim, not resentful, at the cinema with Dangerous relationships (1959). His physique is pleasing and Italian cinema gives him its sweetest eyes. During the following decade, he would chain the

movies (Violent Summer, The Braggart, Il Successo, Italian Murder…). ”

“Do you know how I shot Le Fanfaron? he asked. It was Jacques Perrin who had to do it. As Dino Risi had shot a screen test with his understudy, and Perrin was no longer free at the time of the shooting, I was hired because I looked like Jacques Perrin’s understudy.”

In 1966 comes the consecration. The tandem he forms with Anouk Aimé in “A man and a woman” won the most prestigious awards (Cannes, Oscars etc.)

Here it is now in the firmament: “I must have made twenty-seven films before A Man and a Woman, which allowed me to move on to another level”, told the actor. In September 2006, he will pass a somewhat severe judgment on this emblematic film : “It was a bit of an amateur film, a small film “.

However, he does not stop shooting with the most diverse filmmakers. “My night at Maud’s” by Eric Rohmer (1969), “Z” by Costa-Gavras the same year or even “The conformist” by Bernardo Bertolucci (1970). Later, he will shoot in François Truffaut’s last film “Vivement Dimanche!” in 1983.

What do we find in him? A disturbing calm, an inhabited presence and, also, a magnificent voice. Which annoyed him a bit: I have the impression that even if I read the Bottin, people would say that my voice is enchanting. However, what interests me is the immersion in the text, to understand why the poet wrote these words, in what state of mind. What gives the show depth is its spiritual engagement.”

Marie Trintignant, her second injury

On the private side, Jean-Louis Trintignant will have been married three times.
In 1954, he married actress Stéphane Audran, whom he divorced two years later. In second marriage, in 1961, he will marry the director Nadine Marquand. In 2000, he remarried Marianne Hoepfner, a former rally driver.

In the heart of the summer of 2003, a tragedy occurs. His daughter Marie dies under the blows of the singer Bertrand Cantat.

This terrible tragedy revives a wound that has never healed, the death of his other daughter, Pauline, who died in 1970 a few months after her birth: ” Nadine (Nadine Trintignat, his wife then editor’s note) and me, we had rented an apartment in Rome for two months, the time of the filming of Conformist. We had two children, Marie and a little girl called Pauline. One morning, as I was leaving to shoot, I went to kiss Pauline in her crib. She was dead, we didn’t know how.“

Marie Trintignant died on August 1, 2003.

Sentenced in 2004 to 8 years in prison by the Lithuanian courts for the murder of the actress, Bertrand Cantat was released on parole in October 2007.

“Marie’s death was the greatest suffering of my life. It was impossible to imagine a day without hearing her voice, without seeing her smile. Nothing in the world could have touched me more“, he confided to André Asséo in “On the side of Uzès” (Editions Cherche-Midi).

A lizard seems to me more interesting than a fictional film

For two months he will be “a living dead, incapable of the slightest movement. Two months practically without opening your mouth, without making the slightest judgment“to the point that he will even consider suicide:”When rage is in you, the most extreme feelings become normal. But I still think about it. All the time. I don’t know if death can be stronger than the rare moments of happiness I get from a poetry performance or a meal with a friend.“

It was in the Cévennes, withdrawn from the world, that he will have known moments of peace, only accepting to leave his retirement as an actor out of friendship and admiration for Michael Haneke. or to pay homage to the poets he loved above all else.

He never mentioned his career, yet rich with more than 130 films. The actor, a fine wine connoisseur and himself a producer of a lovely grape variety, had put on a hermit coat and this new status, duly chosen, suited him perfectly: “It is not by seeing a film in a room that I would feel happier. A lizard seems to me more interesting than a fictional film”.
The actor passed away. He was 91 years old.