Obituary of Jean-Louis Trintignant: masterful French actor who brought to the screen a shy but sexy masculinity

Jean-Louis Trintignant is one of those actors whose long and illustrious career continued into his old age. Audiences today probably know him for Love, directed by Michael Haneke in 2012, in which, at the age of 81, he plays a man who lovingly cares for his wife (Emmanuelle Riva) while she is battling Alzheimer’s disease. He won a Csar for this, adding to many previous accolades.

In his sixties, Trintignant also graced a string of major European films, including Three Colours: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) and A Self-Made Hero (Jacques Audiard, 1996), in which his weathered face and distinctive voice delineated troubled and ambiguous scenes. patriarchs. However, you have to go back to his beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s to appreciate the innovative representation of masculinity that he brought to cinema.

The son of bourgeois parents from the south of France, Trintignant quickly traveled to Paris to attend film school and take acting lessons. His directing ambitions will not be there (he directed two quickly forgotten films in 1973 and 1979), and it is as an actor in the theater and especially in the cinema that he imposes himself. After four unforgettable film roles, he had the chance in 1956 opposite Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman, directed by Roger Vadim, the film that projected her to stardom overnight. In Saint-Tropez, all the men panic over Juliette (Bardot), but she only has eyes for Antoine (Christian Marquand), who despises her. At the time, she marries her younger brother, the shy Michel (Trintignant), with whom she ends up falling in love. If the Bardot revolution was to portray a woman who fulfills her own desire, hers was to signal a new type of sexy andromantic quiet manhood.

Neither tall and muscular (like Jean-Paul Belmondo) nor stunningly handsome like Alain Delon, Trintignant, who found his own appearance a bit dark, was closer to the more ambiguous and less macho heroes of the New Wave. Her charm was discreet, making her legendary shyness a strength, especially when her face lit up with her magnificent smile. He was a romantic, interested in women beyond sexual conquest. Meanwhile, her sex appeal was confirmed by her short-lived but passionate off-screen affair with Bardot, for which both left former partners: she, Vadim and he, his first wife Stéphane Audran.

Throughout the 1960s, Trintignant played shy types, sometimes manipulated by cynical figures, as in Vadims Dangerous Liaisons (1959) or Dino Risis Il sorpasso (1962), but he was more often a romantic lover/husband, as in My love, my love. (directed by his second wife Nadine Trintignant in 1967) and, of course, in A Man and a Woman by Claude Lelouch, a huge success in 1966, which won a Palme d’Or and an Oscar. In this one, ancestor of the French romantic comedy, he and Anouk Aimé fall in love on a deserted beach in Deauville to the famous tune of cha-ba-da-ba-da by Francis Lais. His virility is nevertheless marked by his passion for racing cars, corresponding to the taste of actors (in 1980, he raced at Le Mans; two of his uncles were racing drivers, as well as his third wife, Marianne Hoepfner, whom he married in 2000).

The attraction of the mythical couple of A Man and a Woman was such that Lelouch recreated it twice, in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later and in 2019 with The Most Beautiful Years of a life, the actors’ penultimate film. But in this tender vein many may prefer to remember another mythical couple, with Françoise Fabian in Eric Rohmers My night with Maud in 1969.

Trintignant was not limited to romantic roles, however. From the early 1960s, he also specialized in politically ambivalent or downright malevolent characters in Le Combat dans l’île (Alain Cavalier, 1962), Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969), Le Conformiste (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) , The Conspiracy (Yves Boisset, 1972), Cop Story (Jacques Deray, 1975) or La Banquire (Francis Girod, 1980). Yet the amorous figure was never far away, as he was often paired with beautiful partners such as Romy Schneider, Dominique Sanda and Catherine Deneuve, an identity encapsulated in the very title of the poignant Amour.

Tragedy touched Trintignant’s life twice. In 1969, he and Nadine lost their second child, Pauline, to sudden death; she made a film about it, It only happens to others (1971) with Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni (the Trintignants then had a son, Vincent, born in 1973). Then, in 2003, his daughter Marie, his eldest with Nadine, was horribly murdered by his companion, the rock singer Bertrand Cantat. To cope with the trauma, Trintignant goes back on stage, reading poetry with great success.

But through his films he will remain the discreet seducer of his youth, with an irresistible smile and, as Françoise Fabian says, with a very sexy voice, which made him magical.

• Jean-Louis Trintignant, from December 11, 1930 to June 17, 2022