VS’is one of Belmondo’s most secret gardens: behind the antics and pranks of all kinds, the actor hid a depth of soul nourished by his Catholic upbringing. “I am a believer without being a practitioner,” he once explained to his biographer Philippe Durant (Belmondo, ed. Robert Laffont). Like many, I only go to mass on special occasions, starting with the saddest: funerals. Believing has helped me on my journey. Believing in a superior entity oriented towards the Good. Believing also gives me the certainty that I will eventually find those I have loved…”
His religious education began in childhood, in the district of Denfert-Rochereau, in Paris, where he attended the parish school. If he quickly stood out for his turbulent nature – always the first to heckle – he also took his first steps as an altar boy with his older brother Alain. During the Second World War, the family often retreated to Clairefontaine, near Rambouillet, where the children were regularly hired by the local priest, Father Graziani, both to provide masses and to help him bury American pilots. whose planes crashed in the area, targeted by the German DCA… “Bébel” kept as a memory of this time the direct confrontation with death, the few pennies he earned for each burial and a taste for adventure nourished by these heroes fallen from the sky…
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Abbé Morin’s cassock
Religion reminds him of the beginning of his career, when Jean-Pierre Melville offers him to play in Léon Morin, priest : the public had just discovered him as a young thug in the sulphurous Breathlessby Godard, prohibited for children under 18, here he is playing an attractive but inflexible priest, opposite a young atheist communist who has fallen under his spell… Far from being ridiculous, Belmondo convinces in one of his most unexpected roles , ensuring high-level verbal contests about the Church, faith and hope…
French Catholics appreciate the feat, like François Mauriac who writes, conquered: “That a good actor [Belmondo] could become any creature, enter any skin, I knew it, he judges in The Literary Figaro in 1961. But here it was necessary to become this saint who does not know that he is a saint and that he was at the same time this boy loved by a woman and who knows that he is loved. Before the first takes, Melville had insisted on sending Belmondo to train with a priest. But to put on the cassock, the actor only had to remember the masses of his childhood and the memorable Abbé Graziani de Clairefontaine…
Despite a dissipated, unbridled and turbulent life, far from Catholic precepts, it must be recognized that Belmondo has always taken the trouble to display a communicative cheerfulness towards his neighbor – which is not nothing in a grumpy world. Anxious never to afflict others with his sorrows, he had erected the smile as the best bulwark against the hard blows of life, such as the death of relatives and lifelong friends, his parents, his daughter Patricia, in a dramatic fire in 1993 , his stroke in 2001… It was in those moments that he also drew strength from his faith to continue on the road, with the hope of seeing his departed loved ones again one day.
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” We’ll see each other again ! »
“I do not fear my own death, it is inevitable, and I made up my mind a long time ago, he confided to journalist Philippe Durant. I believe in another life. Something is bound to happen in the afterlife, the path continues one way or another. Often, I feel the presence of my parents around me, and that comforts me. I think I will see them again afterwards, as I will see all the people I loved: Lino, Gabin, Audiard, and all the others. I hope to find them around a good table, where we will continue to delirious as in the good old days! And then later, much later, I think you end up coming back to Earth one way or another. I believe in reincarnation. We’ll see each other again ! »
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The faith of Jean-Paul Belmondo: “I believe in another life…”