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Jean-Louis Trintignant, a French actor of understated appeal who rose to international fame in the 1960s and 1970s for portraying a lovestruck racer in “Man and Woman,” an enigmatic prosecutor in “Z,” and a hidden gay fascist assassin in “The Conformist”, died on June 17 at his home in the Gard region of southern France. He was 91.
His wife Marianne confirmed his death to Agence France-Presse but did not give a cause. In 2017, he revealed a cancer diagnosis.
In a career spanning seven decades and more than 130 films, Mr. Trintignant was regarded as one of the most accomplished, if reserved, European film stars of his generation. He was private, restless, and afraid of repeating himself in his work, sometimes threatening to retire from show business entirely.
Its reputation has been built on a handful of commercial successes and art-house favorites: filmmaker Claude Lelouch’s insanely stylized A Man and a Woman (1966), Costa-Gavras’ Oscar-winning political thriller Z (1969), Éric Rohmer’s cerebral and sexy romantic drama My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s disturbing The Conformist (1970).
At 82, Mr. Trintignant came out of a 15-year retirement to give a masterful performance as a cultured Parisian caring for his disabled wife in Amour (2012), which won the Oscar for best foreign language film the Cannes Film Festival. It was a characteristic twist from Trintignant, with a character whose intellect and emotional restraint mask an inner anguish.
“The best actors in the world,” he once said, “are the ones who feel the most and show the least.”
The aimless son of a wealthy industrialist said he only took up acting to overcome his shyness on the way to becoming a director. In his early filmography, the nondescript 5-foot-8 Mr. Trintignant is often portrayed as a shy, innocent, powerless person facing forces he neither understands nor controls.
He caught moviegoers’ attention in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956), a showcase for Brigitte Bardot’s outspoken sexuality. He played her celebratory husband who watches as his male brother catches her eye. Off-screen, the two co-stars began a torrid affair that ended their two marriages, Bardot’s to Vadim and Mr. Trintignant to actress Stéphane Audran.
A string of milquetoast parts followed – notables were his roles in ‘The Easy Life’ (1962) and ‘The Success’ (1963), Italian-produced comedies in which Mr. Trintignant’s bland, harshly moralistic personality contrasted with his Exuberance was Charisma by Vittorio Gassman. The films were critical and popular hits that catapulted Mr. Trintignant to the forefront of European cinema.
As a screen presence, he bore none of the overt sexual mystique of other French stars of the era – the mischievousness of Jean-Paul Belmondo, the beauty of Alain Delon, the world-weariness of Yves Montand. Mr. Trintignant’s trademark was a superficial, pleasant ordinariness that masked the depths of strength or despair.
“He emphasized his averageness, turning his lack of obvious definition into an odd kind of strength,” wrote film critic Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. “Movie after movie, he presents himself as a man so unremarkable that one has to wonder if anything is going on beneath that opaque surface. And then he unpacks the package slowly and conscientiously and shows you what’s inside. He always comes across as cautious and alert, waiting for the moment when he can (or has to) reveal himself.
He cemented his popularity in A Man and a Woman, in which he starred opposite Anouk Aimée as widowed lovers with star crosses. They begin an almost wordless affair against the backdrop of sunset walks on the beach and conversations shot through fogged-up windshields.
Featuring an instantly canonical samba music by Francis Lai, the drama won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was a box office sensation. Mr. Trintignant, an amateur racer and nephew of two-time Monaco Grand Prix winner Maurice Trintignant, raced his own on-screen races.
In “Z,” Mr. Trintignant was a seemingly distant and colorless prosecutor conducting an official investigation into the military-ordered assassination of an opposition leader. His horn-rimmed glasses, threadbare suit, and ciphered personality suggest a bureaucrat who’ll go through anything, but his relentless determination and political savvy begin to emerge.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Mr. Trintignant’s performance earned him the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actor. “He was a really good fit for me,” the actor recalled of the character, “someone very reserved, very shy, but who knows exactly what he wants, and I’m a little bit like him; In the end, I always get what I want just by being stubborn.”
In The Conformist he played a sexually deranged political opportunist in 1930s Italy who finds succor in fascism and agrees to become an assassin for the Mussolini regime.
Mr. Trintignant later wrote in his memoirs that his mother and young daughter Pauline died during filming. “Perhaps it’s awful to say that,” he remarked, “but in moments like this, sensitivity becomes extraordinarily sharp. And Bertolucci, who was very close to me, took advantage of my grief.”
New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael commended Mr. Trintignant for “an almost unbelievable intuitive grasp of screen presence; his face is never too full of emotion, never completely blank.” Kael compared him to Humphrey Bogart, adding, “He has the smirking, teeth-baring reflexes of Bogart – cynicism and humor erupting in savagery.”
Jean-Louis Xavier Trintignant was born on December 11, 1930 in Piolenc, a village in southern France and grew up near Pont-Saint-Esprit and Aix-en-Provence. He rebelled against his parents’ will, dropped out of law school and soon began acting in Paris. He won good reviews for his stage work in demanding roles like Hamlet while embarking on a frantic film career.
He starred in experimental films directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, better known for his avant-garde literature. Mr. Trintignant was also Simone Signoret’s young lover in Costa-Gavras’ acclaimed directorial debut, The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), and played a strained Catholic devastated by a chaste encounter with a divorcee in My Night at Maud’s.
In The Does (1968), a moody psychological drama set in Saint-Tropez, France, he played an aloof playboy in a menage a trois with two lesbians. One of the women was played by Audran, who was then married to the film’s director, Claude Chabrol.
Mr. Trintignant landed a big hit as a detective on the Côte d’Azur with Without Apparent Motive (1971). In Other People’s Money (1978), a film that won the French equivalent of the Oscar for best picture, he was involved in a financial scandal as a bank manager. In 1983 he starred opposite Fanny Ardant in François Truffaut’s final credits, the lukewarm mystery comedy Confidentially Yours, and had a small role in Nick Nolte’s film Under Fire as a seedy Frenchman on the CIA payroll in Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s dictator Nicaragua .
Mr. Trintignant and Aimée reunited for Lelouch’s ill-fated update, A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later (1986), but he cut better in Three Colors: Red (1994), the final and most respected part of the directorial from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy about fickle fate. Mr. Trintignant played a prickly and reclusive ex-judge who snoops on his neighbors but is also capable of unexpected endearments.
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 motorcycle. His second marriage to filmmaker Nadine Marquand ended in divorce, and in 2000 he married professional racing driver Marianne Hoepfner, his longtime partner.
Three years later, he fell into depression after a daughter from his second marriage, actress Marie Trintignant, died from injuries sustained by her lover, French rock star Bertrand Cantat, who had been convicted of manslaughter.
In addition to his wife, survivors include a son from his second marriage, Vincent Trintignant.
Mr. Trintignant was still reeling from the loss of his daughter when he was offered the script for Amour. He told reporters that he almost turned it down because he found it too depressing and that he was “at a really dark time in my life,” even contemplating suicide.
Producer Margaret Ménégoz persuaded him to take on the role, joking that if he just waited until filming was over, she would help him with the storyline. When filming wrapped, Mr. Trintignant recalled to the Los Angeles Times, Ménégoz asked him, “Okay, how do we go about it?”
“Well,” he replied, “let’s wait a little.”