Gaspard Ulliel, angel face of French cinema

(Paris) Died suddenly on Wednesday at the age of 37 after a skiing accident, Gaspard Ulliel could just as well, with his angel face, play the pretty boys as the ” bad boy », not hesitating to play on his ambiguity to embody on screen Yves Saint Laurent or the writer saying his farewells in Just the end of the world.

His last appearance on the screens dates back to last fall when he shared the comedy poster Triple gallop revenge by Alex Lutz with Leïla Bekhti and Audrey Lamy.

Two years earlier, he starred in the film Sibyl by Justine Triet with Virginie Efira and Adèle Exarchopoulos. The film was presented in competition at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Having become in a few years a leading actor of French cinema, Gaspard Ulliel is in the distribution of Moon Knight, Marvel series, soon to be broadcast on Disney+.

Revealed in 2003, at barely 19 years old, in the lost by André Téchiné alongside Emmanuelle Béart, Gaspard Ulliel impressed in 2014 for his interpretation of couturier Yves Saint Laurent in Saint Laurent by Bertrand Bonello.

He had been nominated for the César for best actor for this film, but had been beaten by his competitor Pierre Niney in Yves Saint Laurent.

Two Caesars

Born on November 25, 1984, to stylist parents, Gaspard Ulliel spent his childhood between school and the family apartment in central Paris, where he drew for hours.

It is a friend of his mother who offers him to join the agency of actors that she has just created. He is only 11 years old, but he quickly gets a small role in a TV movie.

After a few summer internships at the Cours Florent, he enrolled after his baccalaureate at the University of Saint-Denis for cinema studies, which he abandoned all the more quickly as his career quickly took off.

He was noticed by Michel Blanc who in 2002 offered him a role in a successful comedy, Kiss whoever you want.

But the developer will be André Téchiné with the lost where he plays Yvan, a rather wild boy who, during the exodus, crosses the roads of France with two children and their mother. For these two films, Gaspard Ulliel was nominated for the César for Best Male Newcomer in 2003 and 2004.

It’s the third time that will be the good one: he won the statuette in 2005 thanks to A long engagement Sunday by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in which he plays Manech, the fiancé of Mathilde (Audrey Tautou), who disappeared in 1917 in the trenches.

Muse

His eclecticism is undeniable: in 2009, we find him as the son of Isabelle Huppert in A dam against the Pacific by Rithy Panh, but also as an offshoot of Jean Reno in a thriller, The first circle. In 2010, he played Henri de Guise in The Princess of Montpensier by Bertrand Tavernier.

Having become a leading actor, he continued filming, including in the United States in Hannibal Lecter: The Origins of Evil, which recounts the young years of the cannibalistic serial killer. Her first role in English.

In 2017, he won the César for best actor for his moving role in Just the end of the world by Quebec prodigy Xavier Dolan, about a writer who, after twelve years of absence, comes to announce to his family that he is going to die.

His face and his silhouette of a young first, he also displays them in fashion shows and advertising films.

A contract signed with Chanel for which he became the muse of a perfume made him say: “Suddenly, I had a financial comfort which allowed me to choose, to wait, not to flood the screens”.

One of its directors, Rodolphe Marconi, who made it turn in The last day, says of him: “Gaspard is a blue sky crossed by clouds which never burst. A strange boy, difficult to break through. It surely has a crack, the day it opens, it will hurt…”.

The actor was the father of a little boy.