The actor Jacques Sereys, honorary member of the Comédie-Française who played fifty roles on stage but also in films by Louis Malle, died at the age of 94, announces the Elysée in a press release.
"He was an esteemed figure in French theater and a familiar face in our popular cinema", underlined the presidency on Sunday evening, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron saluting "a man who had dedicated his life to the theater".
"Jacques Sereys served texts which, by their melancholy or their panache, their verve or their subtlety, said everything about a certain French spirit", continued the Elysée.
This Marseillais born in 1928 and raised by his mother, an embroiderer, had started in a small job at Crédit Lyonnais before landing in Paris in 1947, driven by his desire to become an actor.
“At nineteen, he read his classics, lost his accent and passed the Conservatory.
From then on, he worked, read, learned,” wrote the Comédie-Française on its website, which he joined in 1955 for 30 years.
Winner of a Molière in 2006
"With a pronounced taste for intermittence", notes the House of Molière since he left the venerable institution in 1965 to finally join it in 1978 until 1997. He played a varied repertoire (Marivaux, Genet, Corneille, Goldoni or even Feydeau) and brought Giraudoux into the Comédie-Française.
His comrades are Jacques Charon, Robert Hirsch, Jean Piat and Françoise Seigner.
In 2006, he won the Molière for best actor for his only-on-stage “On the side of Proust”.
Jacques Sereys had also made incursions into the cinema, notably with his role as head of the secret services opposite Yves Montand in "I... comme Icarus" by Henri Verneuil (1979) and roles in "Le Feu foulet" and "Le Souffle in the heart” by Louis Malle.
He had married Philippine de Rothschild, also a member of the Comédie Française under the name of Philippine Pascale, and with whom he had two children, Philippe and Camille.