Jean-Louis Trintignant

Born on December 11, 1930 in Piolenc (Vaucluse), in the south of France, Jean-Louis Xavier Trintignant is the son of an upper-class industrial family. Racing drivers abound among his family, as he had an uncle, Louis Trintignant, who died during training for a race, and another uncle, Maurice Trintignant, won at Le Mans and twice at the Monaco Grand Prix. But he was clear that he was going another way and at the age of 20 he moved to Paris to study acting. He made his first roles in the theater in the early 50’s in various productions.

Jean-Louis Trintignant made his feature film debut with the mediocre adventure production TKX does not answer . But his work had little impact until Roger Badin bet heavily on him by offering him one of the leading roles in And God… Created Woman , where he played the man who married Brigitte Bardot ‘s character , even though she was not in love. of him, but of his brother. The film caused a huge scandal, but it had a huge impact and turned Brigitte Bardot into an erotic myth. Harassed by the press because he was said to have had an affair with his explosive co-star, Trintignant decided not to delay his conscription any longer and served three years in Algeria.

Back to civilian life he resumed his career. Vadim recruited him again for Dangerous Liaisons , an adaptation of the famous work by Choderlos de Laclos , where he played the gentleman Raphael Danceny, a role later played by Keanu Reeves and Henry Thomas . Around that time he achieved enormous success on stage with a production of “Hamlet”. Shortly after, he performed one of his best works directed by the Italian Dino Risi , La escapada , where he was a responsible law student, extremely shy, who gets hooked by a playboy ( Vittorio Gassman ) to start a crazy trip in a convertible.

Due to his automobile family background, Claude Lelouch decided to cast him as a driver in A Man and a Woman . He himself recommended his good friend of him Anouk Aimée for the female lead. The film became the greatest success of French cinema up to that time and finished establishing Trintignant in the international market. She then took part in numerous titles by top directors, such as Is Paris Burning? , by René Clement, Z , by Costa-Gavras, My Night with Maud , by Eric Rohmer , The Hinds , by Claude Chabrol , and Vivaciously on Sunday, last work of the great François Truffaut . He has been in great demand in Italy, where he has filmed titles such as Bernardo Bertolucci ‘s The Conformist , Luigi Comencini ‘s Sunday Woman or Valerio Zurlini ‘s The Desert of the Tartars .

Sergio Corbucci , one of the greats of spaghetti-westerns, asked Jean-Louis Trintignant to shoot one in English, but he was only willing to accept if his character didn’t speak. The film –possibly the director’s best– ended up being called The Great Silence , in which Trintignant plays Silenzio, a mute hired gun since his throat was slit as a child. Many years later, the actor would speak English for the first time on screen in Under Fire , by Roger Spottiswoode , shot in the 80s when Lelouch was encouraged to reunite him with Anouk Aimée in A Man and a Woman, Part 2 , a deteriorated sequel of the great success

Divorced from the actress Stéphane Audran , he married another, Nadine Marquand -later Nadine Trintignant- , also a screenwriter and director. With her he had three children, Vincent Trintignant (assistant director and screenwriter), Pauline (who died suddenly as a baby) and the late actress Marie Trintignant .

The latter was 17 years old when she appeared with her father in La terraza , by Ettore Scola . But she later carved out a solid career for herself, with big roles in titles like Claude Chabrol ‘s A Woman’s Affair , or Jacques Doillon ‘s captivating Ponette . Trintignant Sr. undoubtedly experienced the worst drama of his life on August 1, 2003, when Marie died as a result of a cerebral edema caused by her boyfriend, the musician Bertrand Cantat, who brutally beat her, as he did regularly, as has been proven. in the trial where he was convicted, after which he was only in prison for three years.

In the late 1980s, Jean-Louis Trintignant had gradually lost interest in movies. He prefers more and more to dedicate himself to the stage. “At this moment in my life, the theater is more in line with my anxieties and my worries”, he declared when he presented the play “Apollinaire” in Spain. He lavishes less and less on the big screen, although he stood out especially playing a retired judge, along with Irène Jacob , in Three Colors: Red , the latest work by Krzysztof Kieslowski . With the arrival of the 21st century, his health has been deteriorating as a result of a car accident and the upset caused by the loss of his daughter, so that throughout the beginning of the millennium he had only shot the comedy Janis and John, with François Cluzet and Sergi López , apart from the fact that he worked as a narrator in a telefilm, and that he lent his voice to one of the characters in the animated film Immortel (ad vitam) , in 2004. Michael Haneke has rescued him to play an octogenarian retired music teacher caring for his disabled wife in Love , winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where he shares the screen with Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert .