The formula is overused, but in this case it is the correct one. With the death of Michel Bouquet, who died at the venerable age of 96, France lost one of its cultural monuments. Indeed, both in the theater, where he played Ionesco, Molière, Shakespeare and company, and in the cinema, where he was directed by Clouzot, Truffaut, and especially Chabrol, Michel Bouquet was considered a legend by his peers. Ultimately, his distinguished career spanned no less than eight decades.
Despite his status as a sacred monster confirmed by three Molière prizes, including one of honor, and two César prizes, Michel Bouquet’s modesty was notorious. To Agence France Presse, he confided in 2019: “I was frozen by life in this state of a little man who said to himself in his corner: “Ah well, I am better off where I am, last of the class, I’m better there; I learn better. My career as an actor was the same thing: I was in front of giants. Shakespeare, Molière… all that. And, I said to myself, to observe them, it is better that I am really persuaded that I am nothing. »
Born in 1925 in the 14th arrondissement in Paris, Michel Bouquet was sent to boarding school with his three brothers by their officer father at the tender age of seven. Unhappy period: of an introverted nature, he is the target of intimidation. In a television portrait produced in 1977, he evokes having only gone to the certificate of primary studies, specifying, with a shining eye: “I do not believe that I was destined for much”.
After having practiced – literally – a thousand and one jobs, in 1943, pretending to go to mass with his mother, he tried his luck at the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts. He found his way.
Contemporary of Gérard Philippe, who apart from talent, a pleasant physique helps to make a star of cinema, Michel Bouquet is the subject of a slower ascent to the big screen. In the theater however, his star shines very early, the friend Jean Anouilh entrusts him with a main role in his Romeo and Jeanette from 1944. A lover of the boards to the end, the actor created original works by Albert Camus there, in addition to presenting to the French public the first translations of plays by Harold Pinter, in particular.
Late Featured
On the side of the seventh art, he is quickly solicited, but for secondary roles, as in the unknown but excellent Manonby Henri-Georges Clouzot, in 1947, after Manon Lescaut. In fact, it was later, towards the end of the 1960s, that Michel Bouquet became a real movie star.
Thus, after participations with François Truffaut in The bride was in black and The Mississippi Mermaid (1967, 1968), Claude Chabrol, who had already hired him to The tiger perfumes himself with dynamite (1965), offered him his first iconic role on the big screen: that of the deceived husband who kills his wife’s lover in the dark and shiny The unfaithful wifein 1968. Between the scenario writer and the actor, it is the perfect agreement.
Of their five other collaborations, we will especially remember the remarkable Just before dark (1971), a kind of antithesis of The unfaithful wife where Bouquet, sublime in pathos, embodies a man who, after murdering his mistress, is plagued by the fact that neither his wife nor the authorities seem to care. There, as always at Chabrol, a virulent criticism of the French bourgeoisie runs implicitly. In this regard, Michel Bouquet has long subscribed, in the cinema, to this figure of the bourgeois.
So that, despite a busy filmography during the 1970s and 1980s, it was mainly in the theater that he found his account. In 1991, however, the Belgian filmmaker Jacquot Van Dormael wrote him the title role of Toto the hero, in which Bouquet plays an embittered old man who, perhaps with lucidity or conversely in full paranoid delirium, fantasizes about what his life could have been like if he had not been exchanged at birth with a another baby. A memorable performance.
The time of laurels
A first Molière was given to him in 1998 for the play Chops, by Bertrand Blier, where he is an “old inconvenient” who arrives at his son and daughter-in-law’s with the explicit aim of “pissing them off”. In the aftermath, in 2001, he is another father “occurring” in the drama how i killed my father, by Anne Fontaine, an interpretation which earned her a César and a Lumière prize. With his partner Charles Berling, who plays his son in the film, he published a collection of interviews that year: The players (Grasset).
The laurels continue to rain down when in 2005, he was awarded a second Molière for his performance in The king is dying, which he will play 800 times. “Classic Ionesco, Giant Bouquet”, headlines Le Figaro. The following year, he obtained a second César thanks to his restrained but moving composition, as president, in The Champ-de-Mars walkerby Robert Guédiguian.
In 2014, a Molière d’honneur rewards his entire stage career.
However, Michel Bouquet hardly slows the pace. His characteristic, once resonant voice is more frail, but the passion remains. In 2017, he is featured in Tartuffeby Molière, while at the cinema, he is filming in 2021 in secret ceremonyby Tatiana Becquet-Genel, to be published.
At the announcement of his death, emotional testimonies were quick to flow. Longtime friend Fabrice Luchini wrote on Instagram:
” [C’est] the actor who meant the most to me. He had three essential things: he was an absolute monk, he had this unique diction in the history of theater and he had this magnificent voice. »
So much so that, at the risk of contradicting the deceased, we will state bluntly that Michel Bouquet, it was not nothing.