Un comédien très discret

Trintignant in Trois couleurs: rouge (1994)

Et Dieu enleva… Jean-Louis Trintignant, last Friday, the 91 year-old actor of over 120 films, and perhaps the greatest French actor of the post-war period. Actually, scratch ‘perhaps’. The Nouvelle Vague created many female stars - Moreau, Deneuve, Audran, Lafont, Bardot, of course, Aimée, Girardot, and others - but fewer male ones. Delon and Belmondo quickly turned commercial after initial successes with Visconti and Godard respectively; Trintignant alone continued to appear in interesting work, to be joined by Noiret and Rochefort, character actors who rose to leading man status in the way one could, because in French films the actors looked like ordinary people.

Sure, Trintignant made his share of clinkers, but it is hard to beat this for a roll call of collaborators: Vadim, Costa-Gavras, Robbe-Grillet, Lelouch, Chabrol, Rohmer, Bertolucci, Clément, and Truffaut (finally, in his last film). Then, having reached a certain age, he started again with a new generation of directors: Kieslowski, Haneke, Audiard, Blier. He was a man who had to work - three or four films a year, and theatre too.

‘L’homme qui ment’

There was something remote, inscrutable even, about a typical Trintignant performance; he did not surrender easily to the spectator’s favour, could seem cold, hard to trust. The eyes saw everything while giving little away, the incisive delivery took few prisoners. Bertolucci saw this quality and turned it to his advantage in Il Conformista, in which Trintignant plays a wannabe fascist who becomes a cipher, masking his vulnerability and damaged past beneath a veneer of time-serving. Audiard saw it again when he cast Trintignant as the duplicitous Albert Dehousse, in Un héros très discret, an early masterpiece about a phoney Resistance fighter. He was an actor of the intellect, who weighed his words carefully and, if you were watching closely, showed you the truth.