Jean-Paul Belmondo, the actor whose crooked nose and raffish grin served as signposts and emblems of the French New Wave, died on Monday at the age of 88 years old. Belmondo shot to fame in 1960 when cast as a petty crook in Jean-Luc Godard’s iconoclastic crime drama Breathless, and stood for several decades as one of the major stars of French cinema.
Belmondo was born in 1933 in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, to parents who had met at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. His father Paul Belmondo was a Pied-Noir sculptor in the classical style, born in Algiers and possessing Sicilian and Piedmontese heritage. But though the young Jean-Paul was enrolled in some of the best schools, he proved an unruly pupil and turned his attentions to football and boxing.
After a brief flurry of knockout victories as an amateur boxer, Belmondo settled on a career in acting. He received private tutoring, studied for six months under the actor Raymond Girard, and was admitted to the Conservatoire National SupĆ©rieur d’Art Dramatique in 1952 at the third time of asking. But when he performed a farce by the playwright Georges Feydeau on his graduation from the conservatory, his louche style continued to vex his tutors, who halted his accession to the ComĆ©die-FranƧaise. Belmondo was instead paraded about the stage on the shoulders of his fellow students.
He had already commenced a career on the stage, while on screen he appeared alongside Alain Delon in Be Beautiful But Shut Up and in Young Sinners by Marcel CarnƩ, where he took the role of a gangster. But it was in Sunday Encounter, another comedy by the director Marc AllƩgret, that Belmondo drew the attention of Jean-Luc Godard, who was working on a treatment by his fellow critics FranƧois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol as he sought to embark on his first feature.
Ć bout de souffle, released as Breathless in the United States, made Belmondo an international star while defining the modes and tones of French New Wave cinema. Directors like Godard and Truffaut were inspired by the headlong pace and pulpy melodrama of popular Hollywood films and by the rough camerawork and earthy locales of Italian neorealism. They captured the cigarette smoke ambiance and cool ambivalence of film noir while adding more overt political and philosophical gestures, often within the frame of existentialism.
In Breathless, Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard used handheld cameras and natural lighting for a stylised take on reportage, as they shot without permission on the streets of Paris. Dialogue was sometimes improvised on the spot, and jump cuts elided the ponderous boundaries between thought and action. With Belmondo still unknown outside of France, Godard cast Jean Seberg as his whirlwind muse and tormentor, fresh from her work with the acclaimed director Otto Preminger. In the role of the wanton criminal Michel, Belmondo bore a crooked charm and a self-reverential air of detachment.
Belmondo starred opposite Jeanne Moreau in the drama Moderato cantabile by Peter Brook, which won acclaim at Cannes but received a lukewarm reception from the public. He featured in Web of Passion by Claude Chabrol, in the gangster movie Consider All Risks, and opposite Claudia Cardinale in The Lovemakers. He was cast against type in the war film Two Women by Vittorio De Sica, where he played a bespectacled intellectual with communist sympathies, and as the title character in LĆ©on Morin, Priest by Jean-Pierre Melville. And he reunited with Godard for the musical comedy A Woman Is a Woman, where he played alongside Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy.
Still to international fans and some of his French admirers, Belmondo remained typecast as Michel from Breathless, uncouth and unkempt with a quickening glimmer. In a profile for The New York Times in 1965, the film critic Eugene Archer wrote:
‘Belmondo is a later manifestation of youthful rejection – and more disturbing. His disengagement from a society his parents made is total. He accepts corruption with a cynical smile, not even bothering to struggle. He is out entirely for himself, to get whatever he can, while he can. The Belmondo type is capable of anything.’
But while Belmondo exuded the raw physicality combined with a laconic air and hangdog expression which made him the French counterpart to Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, he was also rakish and clowning, helping to establish the penchant for spy spoofs and popular comedies which persists to this day in the work of French stars like Jean Dujardin and Omar Sy.
Continuing to spurn the advances of Hollywood, Belmondo scored a smash hit with the swashbuckling adventure Cartouche, and followed up with the comedies A Monkey in Winter and Banana Peel. He was back with Melville in the noirish Le Doulos and Magnet of Doom, before his career took a turn with the action adventure tale That Man from Rio. One of the box office successes of the year in France, the spy spoof indulged Belmondo’s own taste for Tintin comic and detective novels, and he became increasingly fond of performing his own stunts. Scorning some of his earlier work, he said:
‘I really prefer making adventure movies like Rio to the intellectual movies of Alain Resnais or Alain Robbe-Grillet. But with Francois Truffaut, I’d be willing to try. I played in one – Moderato cantabile with Jeanne Moreau. Peter Brook directed. It was very boring. Like Antonini’s films, Marguerite Duras’s script was full of sous-entendres. Everyone was looking for something significant in every expression. You didn’t just drink a glass of wine. You asked yourself, “Why does she want me to drink it?”‘
More success came courtesy of Greed in the Sun and Weekend at Dunkirk by Henri Verneuil, while the crime escapade Backfire saw him reunite with Jean Seberg. The adventure comedy Up to His Ears began a dalliance with Ursula Andress. And with Godard he again won critical acclaim, as the unhappily married Ferdinand in Pierrot le Fou opposite Anna Karina. At the urging of Andress, Belmondo spent several months in the United States but remained reluctant to pursue a career in Hollywood. He returned to France, and ended the decade with The Brain, a comic smash which co-starred David Niven, and Mississippi Mermaid with FranƧois Truffaut and Catherine Deneuve.
At the beginning of the seventies, Belmondo starred alongside Alain Delon as a pair of gangsters in Borsalino. The film was successful in France, but the relationship between the actors broke down amid disputes over screen time and billing. Belmondo responded by establishing his own production company, which he called Cerito Films. Directed by Claude Chabrol, its first picture was the black comedy Dr. Popaul, in which Belmondo played an abusive husband opposite Mia Farrow hell-bent on vengeance. But Stavisky by Alain Resnais proved a souring experience, as the film faced legal action and was maligned by the critics.
In 1975, Belmondo for the first time took the role of a police detective in the action flick Fear Over the City. Performing many of his own stunts, including a rooftop chase as metro cars hurtled over the Bir-Hakeim bridge and a daring descent by helicopter, the film was a resounding success at the French box office. Now affectionately known as Bebel by the French public, over the next decade Belmondo scored hit after hit in the occasional comedy and like-minded police thrillers. But when the audience’s appetite waned, he made a belated return to the stage where he revelled in works by Jean-Paul Sartre and his favourite dramatist Georges Feydeau.
In 1990, he played the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac to scores of spectators in Paris.Ā In 1995 he was briefly on screen in the AgnĆØs Varda comedy One Hundred and One Nights and took the lead role in Claude Lelouch’s version of Les MisĆ©rables. Back in the swing, Belmondo played an ageing Don Juan in the comedy DĆ©sirĆ©, while in Une chance sur deux he was once more opposite Alain Delon as Vanessa Paradis embarked on a quest to find her father.
In the autumn of 2001, Belmondo suffered a stroke, which was followed by a long period of rehabilitation. It was eight years before he was back on the big screen, in A Man and His Dog by Francis Huster. A remake of the classic Italian neorealist drama Umberto D. by Vittorio De Sica, Belmondo played a pensioner forced out onto the streets of Paris in what would prove his final film.
Jean-Paul Belmondo received the CĆ©sar Award for Best Actor in 1989, cast against type in Itinerary of a Spoiled Child as an old circus entrepreneur who goes on the run in Africa. But Belmondo refused to accept the award in person, citing an old feud between his father and the sculptor CĆ©sar Baldaccini while continuing to rankle the professors and critics. In 2007 he was promoted to commandeur in the LĆ©gion d’honneur, in 2011 he received the Palme d’honneur at Cannes, andĀ in 2013 he was celebrated at the LumiĆØre Film Festival in Lyon by an array of star names including Quentin Tarantino.
Belmondo also received the Order of Leopold from Belgium and an honorary Golden Lion from Venice as he settled into a life of retirement. In 2019 he was elevated to grand officier in the LĆ©gion d’honneur. Married twice and fathering four children, his death at his home on the Quai d’Orsay on Monday brought tributes from across the world of cinema and beyond, led by Alain Delon and the French president Emmanuel Macron.
