French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo died on Monday at the age of 88, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency, which quotes the interpreter's lawyer. An icon of modernity that the Nouvelle Vague brought with him, Belmondo shot with the greats of his time, such as his discoverer Jean-Luc Godard, but also François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Pierre Melville. Born in 1933 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the bourgeois periphery of Paris, Belmondo was the son of artists: a sculptor of Italian origin and a painter who used to take him as a model for her canvases. Poor pupil, soccer fan, and professional boxer during his youth, Belmondo became an actor in his teens. But his beginnings in the trade were not easy. Rejected by the Paris Conservatoire in 1955,He presented the jury with a sleeve cut, according to the legend.
Three years later, he came across a young filmmaker on the street. It was Jean-Luc Godard. He proposed to shoot a short film in a small rental apartment. "I doubted his real intentions," he once explained to the
Libération
newspaper
. "I replied that the cinema did not interest me at all." At his insistence, he accepted. They shot the short
Charlotte et son Jules
, a first collaboration that would give rise to other more famous ones, such as
At the end of the getaway
and
Pierrot le fou
. In parallel, he gradually moved towards popular comedy, filming some of the great successes of French cinema of the last decades, from
The Professional and Borsalino
, where he coincided with his nemesis, Alain Delon, to
The incorrigible.
o
The man from Rio
.
He was a popular star as well as a champion of auteur cinema.
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