Jean-Paul Belmondo was not only a great actor. He could have been a boxer, a member of the GIGN, but he had chosen cinema. With him, the bad guys had better watch out. An accomplished athlete right up to his last films, L’As des aces took all the risks: he was known to ensure himself the perilous acts of the characters he played in his films. Because this daredevil, who disappeared on Monday September 6, 2021 at the age of 88, did not like to cheat.
Friend of several professional stuntmen, including Rémy Julienne, he was almost never doubled and accomplished most of his exploits himself from The Man from Rio (1964) and until his stroke in 2001 at the age of 68, sometimes with so little equipment that it was almost unconscious.
“A lot of people have seen me do stunts and they know I do them myself, I don’t get double-crossed”he admitted. “When I was very young, I hesitated between a sports career or an actor and with this kind of cinema I do both, so I am a happy man”he added.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2CBmyIahx4
That it passes between two buildings on a cable in The Man from Riothat it evolves on the roof of a subway and flattens just before passing in the tunnel in fear over the citythat he finds himself suspended from a helicopter in his underpants and multiplies aerial acrobatics in The Guignoloor that he climbs a pier in a canoe launched at 100 km / hour in Happy Easterhis antics and his tightrope walks have delighted generations of spectators.
The waterfalls, Jean-Paul Belmondo “never had enough“, told the Parisian in 2017 the stuntman Rémy Julienne, who trained him for all his films. “He was tremendously athletic, of course, had no vertigo, but above all he had a phenomenal mind..” “With him, it was always faster, always stronger, always further (…) he had absolute confidence, which is extremely rare, including from professional stuntmen. (…) It was still imprudent, what we were doing! When I think about it today, my hairs stand on end…”