Claude Brasseur: a crumpled-up cinema knight - obituary

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Claude Brasseur and Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à part (»The Outsider Gang«) from 1964

Photo: ddp images

Most of the fun was obviously the annoyances and troublemakers.

At a young age, Claude Brasseur appeared as a gentle-eyed chanson singer in a white tailcoat, and there are great videos from the 1960s to admire on YouTube.

He played a love-crazy dentist with thinning hair in his most popular role ever in "La Boum - Die Fete" from 1980, where he made teenage life difficult for his daughter, played by Sophie Marceau.

And he kept playing villains and tough commissioners.

But when he was allowed to play the treacherous owl, as he did when he was almost 80 years old in the “Breakfast at Monsieur Henri” from 2016, then Brasseur seemed to be particularly enthusiastic about his acting profession.

Exactly 50 years earlier he had made the successful film "An elephant is tremendously wrong".

In one scene of this buddy comedy, which was not called that at the time, he appeared in a bistro as a misanthropist with sunglasses and a white cane - and expertly dismantled glasses, dishes and half of the furnishings.

Claude Brasseur, who has now died at the age of 84, became a star of the cinema and a darling of the French media, not just as an actor but as a daredevil.

He drove rallies himself, suffered serious injuries at least once in an accident and won the Paris-Dakar rally in 1983 as a co-driver of professional racing driver Jacky Ickx.

It was also about speed when the actor Brasseur in Jean Luc-Godard's 1964 film "The Outsiders Gang" ran through the Louvre in Paris together with Anna Karina and Samy Frey in the alleged record time of nine minutes and 43 seconds.

Casual charm and a bad mood

Brasseur and Frey played two young useless boys who are planning a robbery and who are in love with the girl who is supposed to make them big money.

The film is an ironic counterpart to Truffaut's elegiac triangular love drama "Jules and Jim" from 1962. In cool exuberance, Brasseur, Karina and Frey wiggle their hips in what is now a cinema-historical dance scene and practice the glamor and gangster poses they perform know American films.

»The Outsider Gang« is a masterpiece of the Nouvelle Vague.

The actor Brasseur wasn't really interested in their ideas.

In the sixties and seventies he played pretty randomly crumpled everyday characters, funny characters and secret service agents, even in not very artistically ambitious cinema films and television productions.

With his often only half-open eyes, the rather sparsely hairy stubborn skull and the not particularly athletic body, he embodied a French everyone, equally gifted for casual charm and bad mood.

When asked what was really important to him, he replied in an interview: "Acting in the theater and eating and drinking well with friends".

You can well imagine the gruff tone.

Brasseur grew up as the child of the actor couple Odette Joyeux and Pierre Brasseur in Paris, the parents were particularly successful in the theater.

The father had his most important cinema appearance in Marcel Carné's classic film »Children of Olympus« from 1937 and also wrote a few songs for Edith Piaf.

His son Claude allegedly wanted to be a journalist for a while, trained as a parachutist in the military and then switched to acting.

Together with Jean-Paul Belmondo, he studied at the Paris Conservatory and began as a young, but not too conspicuous heroic actor in the theater.

In addition, he sang chansons, played his first film roles and dreamed of a career as a racing driver.

He had one of his really big triumphs on stage, if the reviews are to be believed, in "The Three Musketeers" in the late 1970s.

Brasseur played the musketeer D'Artagnan in the stage version of the novel by Alexandre Dumas.

As is well known, the golden slogan of the three title heroes is: "One for all, all for one".

The actor Claude Brasseur was a broken knight for almost all cinema roles - and an identification figure for many cinema viewers.

When he appeared in the sex-loving thriller "Descent to Hell" in the mid-eighties as the lover of Sophie Marceau, who was 30 years his junior - of all things, as the lover of his daughter from "La Boum" - it caused a bit of scandal.

Something similar happened to him when he was arrested a few years later for buying cocaine.

This has in no way damaged his reputation as a smart, bustling darling of the French film, television and theater world.

In his private life, he was married to the journalist Michèle Cambon after a brief first marriage from 1970, their son Alexandre continues the family tradition and is an actor.

In Claude Sautet's film "A Simple Story" from 1978, Brasseur is seen as the jealous partner of the heroine played by Romy Schneider, who at a terrible moment becomes violent against his lover - and then faces her judgment.

"I don't feel like living with you anymore," says Romy Schneider.

And the man replies as if he wanted to beat himself up: "I can understand that." Brasseur has played the role of heroic curmudgeon many times in his acting life, often funny for laughing and sometimes nerve-wracking.

But never as poignant as in "A Simple Story".

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