Michel Piccoli

Talking about Piccoli is talking about film history, since from his role as little more than a figurant in  Sortilèges , just after the Second World War, until 2011 when he continues to work at full capacity, despite being an old man, he has worked in more than two hundred films with the most prestigious European directors. I refer of course to his compatriots  Of him Jean Renoir ,  Jacques Demy ,  Agnès Varda ,  Jean-Luc Godard ,  Claude Chabrol ,  Claude Sautet ,  Alain Resnais ,  Jacques Rivette ,  Louis Malle ,  Leos Carax ,  Jacques Doillon , Bertrand Tavernier ,  Claude Lelouch ,  Roger Vadim … But also the Spanish Luis Buñuel and  Luis García Berlanga , the British  Basil Dearden  and  Alfred Hitchcock  – Topaz  (1969) of the magician of suspense is the closest he has come to Hollywood, if we discount his presence in René Clement’s choral film  Is Paris Burning?  (1966)–, to the Portuguese  Manoel de Oliveira , to the Italians  Marco Bellocchio ,  Marco Ferreri ,  Nanni Moretti  and Liliana Caviani, to the Czech Jirí Weiss, to the Greek Costa-Gavras. With the Chilean living in France  Raúl Ruiz He made the prestigious  Genealogy of a Crime  (1997).

Piccoli’s first roles on the screen were small, and his growing prestige was carved out on the theater stages, with the Renaud-Barrault company and his performances at the Théâtre de Babylone. There he participates in productions by authors such as Pirandello and Strindberg, along with other lesser-known ones; As time passes, works by Molière, Chekhov and Shakespeare will not be lacking in his repertoire. He will always be faithful to his slogan of approaching the roles “as an eternal debutante.”

His presence in films such as  French Cancan  (Jean Renoir, 1954) is fleeting, but he is already noticeable in  The Confidant  ( Jean-Pierre Melville , 1962). In any case, and after doing The Day and the Hour (1963) with René Clement  , The Contempt  is considered the turning point of his career  , a film shot that same year under the orders of one of the fathers of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean Luc Godard. In this mythical adaptation of  Alberto Moravia ‘s work,  he would coincide with  Brigitte Bardot  and  Jack Palance .

With  Luis Buñuel  he made six films, including  Diary of a Chambermaid  (1964),  Belle de jour  (1967),  The Milky Way  (1969) and  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie  (1972). The actor has explained that he was always very interested in the Spanish director knowing him, and that he managed to convince him to see him work in the theater; when he finally succeeded, the filmmaker left the room when he realized that Jean Renoir was also there, who had also adapted the work by Octave Mirbeau on which  Diary of a Waitress is based.. He has claimed to have learned humor and modesty from the Aragonese director, which is why throughout his career he has accepted leading roles and other small ones, whenever they aroused some interest in him.

Other directors with whom he repeated on a good handful of occasions are Marco Ferreri and Claude Sautet. One of the most emblematic titles of the latter is  Las cosas de la vida  (1970). Piccoli would explain that a strategy in his acting compositions is to put in his character, apart from what the script dictates, something of the personality of the filmmaker who directs him, which would be noticeable in his work with Buñuel, Sautet , Oliveira and Moretti. Among the actors with whom he has shared the screen the most are  Catherine Deneuve ,  Marcello Mastroianni  and  Romy Schneider .

No one can doubt that Piccoli was a great actor, and yet there weren’t that many awards on his shelf either. At Cannes he was considered best actor for  Leap into the Void  (Marco Bellocchio, 1980) and the same happened in Berlin with  Une étrange affaire  ( Pierre Granier-Deferre ) the following year. The Oscars did not know who he was, if we excepted the award for best foreign film for Buñuel for  El discreet enchantment of the bourgeoisie . Not even the César awards in his country recognized him, despite his 4 nominations. As an artist he also tried stage direction, and getting behind the camera, although he did not shine in these fields.

Regarding his personal life, Piccoli was married three times, with actresses:  Eléonore Hirt , who gave him his only daughter; Juliette Greco ; and Ludivine Clerc. Politically, he signified himself as a man of the left, although with a broad vision and without being very activist; the years also produced in him a healthy skepticism: “This time frightens me, with its gigantic lies. It is no longer a question of whether to be a communist or a liberal, of the right or of the left, all of that has jumped. There is a kind of layer of lead that completely annihilates us.”

That at the age of 85 he gets the lead role in a film has a lot of merit, and this is exactly what happened in  Habemus Papam  (Nanni Moretti, 2011), where he described his character as the recently elected and frightened Pope as “a man of the church, and shy, secret, full of pain but very discreet”. And he reflected: “I wonder if in professions such as priest, cardinal or pope, or artist in general, a lot of energy is not required to believe, not just to believe in God, but to believe in the general image of what It’s the man and the woman.” Regarding his ‘colleague’ John Paul II – who in his youth was an actor – he commented that “he was a religious, but he was a real life man, he was not a lazy priest or a poet, but a combat priest.”

From the vantage point of his years and experience, Piccoli had no qualms about praising American actors for their ingenuity and modesty, to the point of expressing his admiration for  Robert Mitchum : “Do you know an actor as good as him? Frankly, I don’t see it, ”he declared in an interview on Télérama. And he assured that “actors who have no shame are bad phonies.”