Jean-Louis Trintignant, French actor with powerful restraint, dies at 91

His wife, Marianne, confirmed his death to Agence France-Presse but did not provide a cause. In 2017, he revealed a diagnosis of cancer.

Over a career spanning seven decades and more than 130 films, Mr Trintignant was considered one of the most accomplished, if reluctant, European film stars of his generation. He was private, restless, fearful of repeating himself in his work, and sometimes threatened to retire from show business altogether.

His reputation rests on a handful of commercial successes and arthouse films: the filmmaker Claude Lelouchs deliriously stylized A Man and a Woman (1966), the Oscar-winning political thriller Z by Costa-Gavrass (1969), ric Rohmers’ cerebral and sexy romantic drama My Night at Mauds (1969) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s unsettling The Conformist (1970).

At 82, Mr. Trintignant was emerging from 15-year retirement to give a masterful performance as a cultured Parisian caring for his unfit wife in Love (2012), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film as well as the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a signature Trintignant turn, featuring a character whose intellect and emotional reserve hide an inner torment.

The best actors in the world, he once said, are those who feel the most and show the least.

The aimless son of a successful industrialist, he said he started acting simply as a way to overcome his shyness on the path to becoming a director. In his early filmography, the towering 5-foot-8 Mr. Trintignant was often portrayed as shy, innocent, and powerless in the face of forces he didn’t understand or control.

He caught the attention of moviegoers in Roger Vadims And God created the woman (1956), a showcase of Brigitte Bardot’s freewheeling sexuality. He played her solemn husband watching his manly brother catch his eye. Off screen, the two co-stars embarked on a torrid affair that ended their two marriages, Bardots with Vadim and Mr. Trintignants with actress Stéphane Audran.

A series of milquetoast parts followed, the most notable of which were his roles in The Easy Life (1962) and The Success (1963), Italian comedies in which Mr. Trintignant’s gentle, rigidly moralistic personality contrasted with the boisterous charisma by Vittorio Gasman. The films are critical and popular successes which propel Mr. Trintignant to the forefront of European cinema.

As a cinematic presence, he carried none of the overt sexual mystique of other French stars of the time, the playfulness of Jean-Paul Belmondo, the beauty of Alain Delon, the world-weariness of Yves Montand. . Mr. Trintignant’s trademark was a superficial, pleasant banality that masked depths of strength or despair.

It underscored its mediocrity, turned its apparent lack of definition into a kind of uncanny strength, film critic Terrence Rafferty wrote in The New York Times. Film after film, he presents himself as a man so ordinary that one has to wonder if there is something going on under this opaque surface. And then slowly, carefully, he unwraps the package and shows you what’s inside. He always seems cautious and vigilant, waiting for the moment when he can (or must) reveal himself.

He cemented his popularity in A Man and a Woman, co-starring Anouk Aime as star-crossed widowed lovers. They begin an almost wordless affair against the backdrop of sunset beach walks and filmed conversations through mist-soaked windshields.

The drama, with instantly canonized samba score by Francis Lai, won the Oscar for best foreign language film and caused a sensation at the box office. Mr. Trintignant, amateur racing driver and nephew of the double winner of the Monaco Grand Prix Maurice Trintignantmade his own run on the screen.

In Z, Mr. Trintignant was a seemingly detached and colorless prosecutor leading an official investigation into the military-ordered killing of an opposition leader. His tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, well-worn suit, and cipher-like personality suggest a bureaucrat who goes through the stages, but his unwavering resolve and the political sense gradually emerges.

The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and Mr. Trintignant’s performance won him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. He suited me very well, recalled the actor of the character, someone very quiet, very shy, but who knows exactly what he wants, and I look a bit like him; in the end, by dint of stubbornness, I always get what I want.

In The conformist, he played a sexually confused political opportunist in 1930s Italy who finds succor in fascism and agrees to become an assassin for Mussolini’s regime.

Mr. Trintignant later wrote in his memoirs that his mother and baby daughter Pauline died during filming. Maybe it’s horrible to say that, he observed, but in such moments the sensitivity becomes extraordinarily acute. And Bertolucci, who was very close to me, took advantage of my grief.

New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael praised Mr. Trintignant for his almost unbelievable intuitive understanding of screen presence; her face is never too full of emotion, never completely blank. Comparing him to Humphrey Bogart, Kael added: He has the smiling, teething reflexes of Bogart’s cynicism and the humor bursts into savagery.

Jean-Louis Xavier Trintignant was born in Piolenc, a village in the south of France, on December 11, 1930, and grew up in Pont-Saint-Esprit and Aix-en-Provence. Rebelling against his parents’ wishes, he dropped out of law school and soon began performing in Paris. He won good reviews for his stage work in demanding roles such as Hamlet while embarking on a checkered film career.

He appears in films directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, best known for his avant-garde literature. Mr. Trintignant was also the young lover of Simone Signoret in The Sleeping Car Murders (1965). My Night at Mauds.

He portrayed an aloof playboy in a threesome with two lesbians in The Does (1968), a moody psychodrama set in Saint-Tropez, France. One of the women was played by Audran, who was then married to director Claude Chabrol.

Mr. Trintignant had a huge success with Sans motif apparent (1971), as a detective on the Côte d’Azur. In Other Peoples Money (1978), a film that won France’s equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar, he was a bank executive embroiled in a financial scandal. In 1983, he played with Fanny Ardant in the end credits of filmmaker François Truffauts, the warm police comedy Confidentially Yours, and had a small role in Nick Nolte’s film. under fire, like a sleazy Frenchman on the CIA payroll in dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayles Nicaragua.

Mr. Trintignant and Aime reunited for Lelouch’s ill-fated update, A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later (1986), but fared better in Three Colors: Red (1994), the latter and director’s best-loved Krzysztof Kieslowski trilogy on Wayward Fate. Mr. Trintignant played a thorny, reclusive former judge who spies on his neighbors but is also capable of unexpected tenderness.

As Mr. Trintignant’s career slowed, he spent more time at his medieval estate near Uzès, in southern France, foraging for mushrooms and riding a motorbike. His second marriage, to filmmaker Nadine Marquand, ended in divorce, and in 2000 he married professional racing driver Marianne Hoepfner, his partner of decades.

Three years later he plunged into depression after a daughter from his second marriage, actress Marie Trintignant, died of injuries sustained in a beating by her lover, French rock star Bertrand Cantat, who was found guilty of manslaughter.

In addition to his wife, the survivors include a son from his second marriage, Vincent Trintignant.

Mr. Trintignant was still in shock at the loss of his daughter when the script for Amour was offered to him. He told reporters he almost refused because he found it too depressing and was in a really dark time in my life, even contemplating suicide.

Producer Margaret Mngoz persuaded him to take the role, joking that she would help him in the act, if only he held off until filming was finished. Once the filming was over, Mr. Trintignant recalled to the Los Angeles Times, Mngoz asked him, OK, how do we do it?

Well, he replied, let’s wait a bit.