“I did what I could, as I could and I didn’t ask myself too many questions.” So spoke Michel Bouquet when he was asked at the end of his life about his exceptional career. His beautiful deep voice will no longer resonate. This theater giant, born in Paris on November 6, 1925, died on Wednesday April 13 at the age of 96, announced his press service.. “Michel Bouquet died at the end of the morning in a Parisian hospital”said this source.
He had started on stage at the Théâtre de Chaillot, at the age of 17. “I was in a Robespierre costume. I had the feeling that it was real, that I was Robespierre. It made me laugh inside. It was my first feelings at the theater”, he once said.
In 1946, Jean Anouilh gave him his first major role in Romeo and Jeanette at the Workshop Theater. This will be followed by striking performances in pieces by Pinter, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard or Camus. The actor loved to clear the great texts. In 75 years, he played around sixty plays with two favorite authors: Molière and Ionesco.
His favorite role? That of Berenger I in The King is dying by Eugene Ionesco. He played it for nearly twenty years in several Parisian theaters and on tour. He was judging the play”very hard because of the heckling of the different sensations through which the actor is forced to pass, from the most comic to the pure tragic.” When he performed it for the last time, on May 10, 2014, the public at the Hébertot Theater applauded him wildly. As often, his wife, the excellent actress Juliette Carré, shared the stage with him. This role earned him his second Molière du actor in 2005, after the one he received in 1998 for Chops by Bertrand Blier. The Academy will also award him an honorary Molière for his entire career in 2016.
Michel Bouquet will remain the unforgettable interpreter of several plays by Molière: Tartuffe or the impostor, The doctor in spite of himself, Dom Juan, The miser, The imaginary patient… In 2017, he also dedicated a book to him: Michel Bouquet tells Molière. “The perfection he achieved with the theater is such that centuries later, people still come in droves to hear his words, he explained, and this is a very strange thing. He continued: Molière obliges his actors to be truthful (…). It is a writing that is at the same time extraordinarily refined and very coarse.” The actor used to come to the theater three hours before the performance “to be as true as possible to a truth that would agree with his own.”
This tireless perfectionist seemed not to age. Each role renewed him. “I can’t imagine that I will stop the theater”, he said in 2017. He will however be forced to do so, at 93, a victim of his fatigue. The actor who was to interpret the role of Einstein in a play by Laurent Seksik realizes that he is too tired to continue rehearsals and gives up his place to Michel Jonasz. He therefore played, without knowing it, his last play at the age of 91. Chance doing things well, it was The Tartuffe of his dear Molière. The staging was by Michel Fau. Michel Bouquet had been his teacher at the Conservatoire.
Story Valérie Gaget and Martin Marini
The general public discovered it at the end of the 1960s thanks to the cinema. He is already in his forties. Bouquet marks the spirits in The bride was in black with Jeanne Moreau then in The Mississippi Mermaid by Francois Truffaut. He then plays the role of a bitter and dark policeman in A count by Yves Boisset. But it is Chabrol who will offer him his most outstanding characters in The unfaithful wife, Breaking, Just before dark or Chicken In Vinegar. They will shoot six films together. Subscriber to the roles of rotten notables and chilling cops, he had fun with his image in 1976 in the comedy by Françis Veber, The toy, alongside Pierre Richard. The story of a cynical man who offers his son a playmate in the flesh.
Michel Bouquet won two Césars: the first in 2002 for how i killed my father by Anne Fontaine. And the second in 2006 for The walker of the Champs de Mars by Robert Guédiguian in which he portrays a masterful François Mitterrand. ‘I am a happy actor who has always met the people he needed to meet when he needed to meet them. For example, when I met Chabrol and Truffaut, I wanted to make films. I met them at the right time”, he confessed.
Michel Bouquet said he had no preference for the theater or the cinema: “The two things are very different but they have the same value” The role of Renoir in Gilles Bourdos’ film in 2013 is one of those that had touched him the most in his life. He embodied the old master practically paralyzed, suffering from severe rheumatism, continuing to paint at all costs .
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Michel Bouquet was a unanimously recognized actor who considered his job as a craft. He said he haddug, dug, dug” throughout his life like the plowman of La Fontaine. He left the stage with the feeling of having done “his merry way.” Those who had the privilege of seeing him on stage will never forget him.