Jean-Paul Belmondo

Jean-Paul Belmondo was the male face of the French New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard cast him as the small-time car thief Michel Poiccard in Breathless (1960), and the performance — offhand, restless, modelled partly on Humphrey Bogart — became the image of the new French cinema. He then worked across the movement and the mainstream for six decades and more than eighty films, doing most of his own stunts, and when he died in 2021 France honored him with a national homage in the courtyard of Les Invalides, a ceremony last held for a former president.

Boxing and the Conservatoire

Belmondo was born on 9 April 1933 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just west of Paris. His father was the sculptor Paul Belmondo, his mother the painter Sarah Rainaud-Richard. The son's first ambition was athletic: he boxed as an amateur, winning his first fights by first-round knockout before quitting the ring. The flattened nose stayed.

At twenty he entered the Paris Conservatoire, the national drama school, and left in the mid-1950s. He worked on the Paris stage through the 1950s and took small film parts. In 1952 he married Élodie Constantin; the marriage produced three children and ended in divorce in 1968.

Breathless

He was still primarily a stage actor in 1959 when Godard, preparing his first feature, cast him as Michel Poiccard, a petty car thief on the run in Paris, opposite Jean Seberg as the American student Patricia. Much of the film happens in room 12 of the Hôtel de Suède, where the two of them talk, smoke, and circle each other for nearly a quarter of the running time.

The performance made him a star at twenty-six, and it became the male image of the New Wave, as Seberg's cropped hair became one of its female images. To the New Wave he gave a way of being on screen — casual, ironic, physically at ease — that the movement made its own.

The movement and the mainstream

He never chose between the movement and the commercial cinema, working for directors from Jean-Pierre Melville to François Truffaut. For Melville he made Léon Morin, Priest (1961) and Le Doulos (1962); for Philippe de Broca, the swashbuckler Cartouche (1962) and then That Man from Rio (1964), an adventure comedy that sold nearly five million tickets in France, with Belmondo performing his own stunts. In 1965 he rejoined Godard for Pierrot le fou, playing Ferdinand, whom Anna Karina's Marianne calls Pierrot.

From the 1970s he settled into a long career as a popular star of action films and comedies, known across France simply as Bébel, and kept insisting on doing most of his own stunts well into middle age. He turned down Hollywood offers, saying the language barrier would be a problem. In 1989 he won the César for best actor for Claude Lelouch's Itinéraire d'un enfant gâté (1988).

The stroke and the homage

In 2001 a stroke paralyzed his right side and took his speech for months. He recovered enough to appear in one further film, then retired from acting. The year after the stroke he married Natty Tardivel, his companion of many years; their daughter Stella was born in 2003, when he was seventy, and the marriage ended in 2008.

The honors came at the end. The Cannes film festival gave him an honorary Palme d'Or on 18 May 2011, and at the 2017 César ceremony the honorary César came with a standing ovation of more than two minutes.

I am very moved by this Palme d'or which has touched my heart.

He died at his Paris home on 6 September 2021, at eighty-eight; his lawyer said he had been very tired for some time and died peacefully. On 9 September President Emmanuel Macron led a national homage in the courtyard of Les Invalides, the first such ceremony since the death of former president Jacques Chirac in 2019, while thousands watched on screens outside before filing past to pay their respects.