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Page 42As a schoolboy in German-occupied
Paris, Michel Bouquet’s only refuge
from the deprivations of wartime came
in the visits he made with his mother to
the city’s theatres.
“Each time the curtain rose, there
was no longer the horror of war, there
were no longer Germans around. The
unreal world far exceeded the real
world,” he recalled. “The artificial life
was the only liveable one.”
He had been a 14-year-old with
dreams of becoming a doctor when war
broke out but his world swiftly fell
apart. His father was imprisoned by the
Nazis and he concluded that life was
“coarse and cruel” and that human
society was “in reduction”.
However, one day in 1942 at the
height of the brutality, his mother took
him to see Maurice Escande, one of the
greatest French actors of the time, play-
ing Louis XV at the Comédie-Fran-
çaise. Bouquet was transported and
knew what he had to do. He looked up
Escande’s address and one Sunday
morning when his mother was at
church, presented himself unan-
nounced at the door of the great man’s
apartment in the Rue de Rivoli.
He introduced himself by saying that
he wanted to be an actor and Escande
asked him to recite a piece. After a few
lines, he had heard enough to invite the
teenager to attend his drama classes
and escorted him home, where he con-
vinced Bouquet’s mother that her son
should pursue a career on the stage.
With Escande as his mentor he won
a place at the Paris Conservatoire and
went on to become a favourite actor of
Albert Camus and Jean Anouilh on
stage and of new wave directors such as
François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol
on screen.
He was equally adept at drama or
comedy, and over the next 70 years he
became France’s Olivier or Gielgud.
Bouquet “brought theatre and cinema
to the highest degree of incandescence
and truth, showing man in all his con-
tradictions, with an intensity that burnt
the boards and burst the screen”, said
President Macron.
Few character actors have ever im-
mersed themselves in their roles with
such total conviction. Acting to Bou-
quet meant carrying “the burden of a
character who invades your life and
haunts you even at night”.
He said: “You risk your life in every
role. It’s a very lonely job, like painting.
One does it in public, but the essence of
it is secret.”
His trademark was an understated
magnetism that enabled him to conjure
the extraordinary out of the ordinary
and to convey the complex passions
and turmoil that can lie behind the
most bland and bourgeois façade. “I
don’t find myself interesting but dull,
banal, flat,” he said. “Yet these are the
roles that give me depth.”
The boards were his kingdom and
when asked by Le Monde in 2006 what
he would have done if he had not be-
come an actor, he replied that he would
have “swept the set or distributed the
props”; anything as long as it involved
working in theatre. He appeared in at
least one play a year for seven decades
between 1944 and 2014, playing in
Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter as well as
the classics. Molière, in whose Tartuffe
he made one of his first stage appearan-
ces, was a particular passion and in old
age he wrote a book chronicling a life-
time of “companionship with the comic
genius of the greatest French play-
wright”. His final appearance in Tartuf-
fe came when he was 92.
He also appeared in more than 100
films, although at times he seemed a re-
luctant movie star and was wary of
overbearing directors, whose input he
believed should end once they had cast
the right actor for the role. “For me, an
actor is only interesting if he defendshis own reading and conception of the
character,” he said.
Smart film-makers such as Chabrol,
of course, bowed to the unique personal
insight Bouquet brought to his roles. He
made seven pictures with the nouvelle
vague director, including 1969’s The
Unfaithful Wife in which he played a le-
thally jealous husband, and 1971’s Just
Before Nightfall in which he brilliantly
portrayed a guilt-ridden man who kills
his lover during a sadomasochistic
tryst, then confesses to his crime while
seeking forgiveness.
Truffaut’s 1968 film The Bride Wore
Black was another new wave landmark
in which he played one of the victims of
Jeanne Moreau’s deranged widow and
he teamed up again with the director
the following year in Mississippi Mer-
maid in which he shone as a private de-Michel Bouquet’s final
appearance in Tartuffe
came at the age of 92
Obituaries
Michel Bouquet
Veteran French actor of stage and screen who worked with new wave directors such as François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol
ALLSTAR/CINETEXT/ALLSTAR COLLECTION/UNITED ARTISTS; MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES;tective attacked by Jean-Paul Bel-
mondo.
He kept up a prolific output in the
cinema alongside his stage appearan-
ces and won a new generation of admir-
ers with his performance in 1991 in Jaco
van Dormael’s Toto the Hero.
Yet he kept the best almost until last
and his two César awards — the French
equivalent of the Oscars — as best actor
came when he was in his seventies. In
How I Killed My Father (2001), he
turned in a menacing performance as a
feckless parent who had been pre-
sumed dead but returns in old age to
sow emotional chaos in the lives of his
two sons. “He’s a greatly original actor.
Even if he has a very relaxed and smil-
ing air, there’s something in his acting
that’s disconcerting, destabilising, that
provokes strangeness all the time,”
Anne Fontaine, the movie’s director,
said.
His second César came four years
later for his bravura performance as an
ailing François Mitterrand during his
final days as president in The Last Mit-
terrand (2005).
He is survived by his second wife, the
actress Juliette Carré, whom he mar-
ried in 1970. Over the years, they
played the roles of King Bérenger
and Queen Marguerite together
in more than 800 performances
of Ionesco’s Exit the King, Bou-
quet winning a Molière
award as best actor for
his performance in
2005.
His first mar-
riage to the actress
Ariane Borg, whoMichel Bouquet with Jeanne Moreau in The Bride Wore Black (1968), in the Jean Anouilh play The
Dinner of Heads, below, and in 2019, the year he finally brought the curtain down on his careerwas ten years
his senior, end-
ed amid lurid
newspaper
headlines when
he left her in- They had
married in 1954
and on his de-
sertion she
went on a hunger strike, losing almost
4st and almost dying. A protracted di-
vorce battle was not concluded until
1981 and she remained bitter and re-
sentful towards her ex-husband until
her death in 2007.
According to his second wife, the
contradicted characters he so often
portrayed on stage and screen were not
that far removed from his real-life per-
sonality. Beneath his “generous, calm
and kind” exterior he was “hypersensi-
tive, very anxious and always
feared not being up to it”,
she said.
Being quintessen-
tially French, he had no
interest in Holly-
wood or anglo-
phone produc-
tions, although
he often ap-
peared in
translations of
writers from
Shakespeare to
Pinter.
One of his
quirks was that
he never had a
driving licence,
preferring to
rely on taxis and the Métro to get
around Paris, the city where he lived all
his life. On the set of The Unfaithful
Wife, Chabrol insisted that he was re-
quired to drive in several scenes and he
almost ran over the camera operator
and future César-winning director
Claude Zidi. Shocked by the narrow es-
cape, he resolved that he would never
get behind the wheel again.
Michel François Pierre Bouquet was
born in Paris in 1925, the youngest of
four sons to Marie (née Monot) and Ge-
orges Bouquet. His father was a remote
figure, who had fought in the First
World War. Rendered taciturn by his
experience in the trenches, he became
an accountant with the Paris police
after the war.
At seven Bouquet was sent to a Cath-
olic boarding school where he endured
what he called “seven years of darkness
and loneliness”. His escape was to with-
draw into himself and dream of imagi-
nary picaresque adventures far away,
an approach to life that he later credited
with formulating his internalised act-
ing style.
The regime was harsh but he enjoyed
being put in detention because it saved
him from having to mingle with the
other boys. He later recalled his young-
er self as “a
sweet kid with
an anarchic
touch”.
He returned
home from
school in the
summer of
1939, never to
return. His
father fought
the Nazis in
the French ar-
my and was
captured and
imprisoned.
After Ger-
man troops
had occupied
Paris in 1940,
his mother moved the family to Lyon,
where they stayed with an aunt, before
returning to Paris a few months later to
live under German occupation.
While his mother worked as a milli-
ner, Bouquet abandoned his education
and to supplement the family’s meagre
income took various jobs as an appren-
tice to a pastry maker, a warehouse-
man, a dental laboratory technician
and a bank messenger.
It was, he later said, “an abominable,
shameful period” with the fantasy
world he discovered in the theatre as
his only escape. By the time the war
ended, he had made his first appearan-
ces on stage and fallen in with an intel-
lectual Left Bank crowd that included
Camus and Anouilh.
Seven decades later he was awarded
the Grand Cross of the Légion d’hon-
neur, France’s highest civilian honour,
and he finally announced his retire-
ment in 2019.
“I did what I could and I didn’t ask
myself too many questions,” he said.
“As an actor it is forgetting yourself that
is most important.”Michel Bouquet, French actor, was born
on November 6, 1925. He died on April 13,
2022, aged 96tik l i l ts a t h s s 1 rfa
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