He amused himself by saying that he had concluded a "pact with God": that of "living half of eternity". But Piccoli did not believe in God and, if he exists, he broke this pact. The French actor died on Monday May 18 at the age of 94, leaving behind 176 feature films, 49 plays and 33 short films. And without doubt the most impressive career in French cinema, who lent his majestic figure, his bushy eyebrows, his broad forehead and his haunting voice to the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Raoul Ruiz, Nanni Moretti, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, Leos Carax, Claude Sautet, Jacques Demy and even Alfred Hitchcock (in "L'Etau", shot in English in 1969).
A cultivated man, fine and full of irony, the man who has always been an atheist had delivered his last major role in a papal cassock. It was in 2011 with “Habemus papam” by Nanni Moretti, where he embodied a newly elected pope and tortured by the fear of not being up to par. Magistral, the actor lent his gravity and his humor to this disoriented prelate. During the presentation of the film at the Cannes Festival, Michel Piccoli had told our newspaper about his delight when Moretti had made him try on his immaculate costume. "I'm like children and all children dress up," he smiled, then… 85 years old.
A few years earlier, in 2006, this son of bourgeois Parisians and musicians (his father was a violinist, his mother a pianist) confided in France Culture: “I am a very great professional, but I have kept an amateur heart and discoverer ". Curious and insatiable, Michel Piccoli intended to exercise his profession in an “extravagant” way. The adjective had inspired the title of the documentary “L'Extravagant Monsieur Piccoli” which Yves Jeuland had devoted to him in 2015. For seventy years, the actor interpreted characters who were often normal in appearance, but complex, ambiguous, even decadent. A very popular figure, he has chained auteur films - he shot up to six feature films a year - without the advice of any agent, guided by his pleasure and his friendships.
Started in the theater at the age of 20 in 1945 after training at the Simon course, Piccoli's career did not take off until 1962. The actor was then 37 years old when "Le Doulos" by Jean-Pierre Melville came out, in which he stands out by playing a mobster against Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Reggiani. "This is the first time that critics have cited my name," said Michel Piccoli * later. A year later, "Le Mépris" by Jean-Luc Godard is released, with this scene which has become legendary in which, lying naked on a bed, Brigitte Bardot asks her: "And my ankles, do you like them? ... And my thighs, do you love?…. Do you find them pretty, my butt? ”, On a melancholy musical theme that has become famous to the point of being taken up by Martin Scorsese in“ Casino ”thirty-two years later.
As he had a "love at first sight" for Godard, which he found in 1981 in "Passion", Piccoli will establish loyalty links with other directors. He will thus become the favorite actor of Luis Buñuel, with whom he shot seven films (including “Diary of a Chambermaid” and “Belle de jour”), of Marco Ferreri (also seven feature films, including “La Grande food ”), by Claude Sautet (five films, including“ The Things of Life ”or“ Vincent, François, Paul… and the others ”) or even by Claude Chabrol (three films). "I had deeply and intimately passionate friendships with men," commented later the man who was also very close to the actors Ugo Tognazzi or Marcelo Mastroianni.
In his interviews, Piccoli did little, answering intimate questions with other questions or with pirouettes. Her friend and former neighbor on the rue de Verneuil in Paris Jane Birkin will one day confess that she has never "ventured beyond her living room". Even Juliette Gréco, who was his second wife after actress Eléonore Hirt and before screenwriter Ludivine Clerc, will admit that she never succeeded in breaking through the Piccoli "enigma". "I like the secret, the doubt, assured this great discreet. I like to search others. I don't like to say completely what I think. »**
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Father of three children (including a daughter with whom he was angry and two adopted children of Polish origin), married three times, Michel Piccoli had later revealed an affair with Romy Schneider. In the book "I lived in my dreams", co-written in 2015 with the former owner of the Cannes Festival Gilles Jacob, the actor will reveal: "She and I had the weakness to let go of gestures not always honest , but it never destroyed, as they say, the friendship we had for each other ”***.
In this fascinating work, Piccoli also told how his vocation as an actor was born, at the age of 9 years. It was while playing a Andersen tale on stage that this silent child discovered the double "wonder" of being listened to by adults and of telling a story that was not his own. The actor then remembered this childhood between an often absent father and a distant mother, who conceived it "by chance and by compensation" after having lost a 3 year old son. "Throughout my childhood, remaining an only son, so there was this ghost with me and I sometimes had the impression that my mother, who spoke little, only appeared to evoke this dead brother", he wrote then .
In recent years, the actor regretted that his health did not prevent him from working. He spoke of his "troubled memory" and the assurances that no longer wanted to cover him ... Four years ago, asked what he would like us to remember, he had very humbly replied: "Michel Piccoli loved his job , he served it as best he could. "****. *" L'Express ", September 30, 2000. ** Idem. ***" I lived in my dreams "by Michel Piccoli with Gilles Jacob, Ed Grasset, 2015. **** Documentary "L'Extravagant Monsieur Piccoli" by Yves Jeuland.
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