Showing posts with label Jean-Paul Belmondo. Show all posts

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Jean-Paul Belmondo, jaunty star of New Wave classic ‘Breathless,’ dies at 88

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg
Breathless

Obituaries

Jean-Paul Belmondo,

jaunty star of

New Wave classic ‘Breathless,’

dies at 88

By Adam Bernstein
September 6, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. EDT

Jean-Paul Belmondo, a French actor who vaulted to international renown as a playfully amoral gangster in Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal 1960 New Wave film “Breathless,” and who later enlivened dozens of hit comedy-adventures with his jaunty presence and stunts, died Sept. 6 at 88.

The office of his lawyer, Michel Godest, confirmed his death but did not share additional details.

With his tousled chestnut hair, sinewy physique and battered Roman nose, Mr. Belmondo personified the nonchalant antihero — the lackadaisical tough guy who could use his fists but would rather slug back a few pastis and see where life, or an adventurous woman, might take him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fcRj0SXYh8

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg

Breathless

In a career spanning six decades and about 90 films, he was most at home playing charming rogues, amorous rebels without a cause, and he became one of Europe’s most popular leading men. No film did more to define his persona than “Breathless,” in which he portrayed a criminal, on the run in Paris, who steals a car, senselessly shoots a police officer and is betrayed by his mercurial American girlfriend (played by Jean Seberg), whom he constantly hectors for sex.

Jean-Paul Belmondo: the beaten-up icon who made crime sexy

Immortalised by Godard and Melville, the actor specialised in seductive tough guys – and blazed a trail through movie history

Peter Bradshaw

Monday 6 September 2021

On the streets of Paris, car thief and fugitive cop killer Michel Poiccard has just been gunned down by the police, having shown an insolent, fatalistic attitude to the idea of getting caught, and indeed to the revelation that his American girlfriend Patricia, wannabe journalist and street vendor of the New York Herald Tribune, has ratted him out. She leans over Michel as he lies dying in a puddle of blood. Will Michel come up with some resonant last words? Not exactly. Defying agony from his bullet wounds, he just clownishly stretches his face into the two silly expressions he’d earlier used to explain the phrase “faire la tête”: a goofy silent scream, then a panto grin. Isn’t this what acting is, what life is: tragedy, comedy, faces, speeches? Who cares?