Jean-Louis Trintignant

Jean-Louis Trintignant

Trintignant in 2007
Born 11 December 1930 (1930-12-11) (age 81)
Piolenc, Vaucluse, France
Years active 1951–present
Spouse Stéphane Audran (div.)
Nadine Marquand (div.)

Jean-Louis Trintignant (born 11 December 1930) is a French actor who has enjoyed an international acclaim. He won the Best Actor Award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

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Career

At the age of twenty, Trintignant moved to Paris to study drama, and made his theatrical debut in 1951 going on to be seen as one of the most gifted French actors of the post-war era. After touring in the early 1950s in several theater productions, his first motion picture appearance came in 1955 and the following year he gained stardom with his performance opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman.

Trintignant’s acting was interrupted for several years by mandatory military service. After serving in Algiers, he returned to Paris and resumed his work in film.

Trintignant had the leading male role in the art-house classic Un homme et une femme, which at the time was the most successful French film ever screened in the foreign market.

In Italy, he was always dubbed into Italian, and his work stretched into collaborations with renowned Italian directors, including Valerio Zurlini in Summer Violent and The Desert of the Tartars, Ettore Scola in La terrazza, Bernardo Bertolucci in The Conformist, and Dino Risi in the cult film The Easy Life.

Throughout the 1970s, Trintignant starred in numerous films and in 1983 he made his first English language feature film, Under Fire. Following this, he starred in François Truffaut's final film, Confidentially Yours.

In 1994, he starred in Krzysztof Kieślowski's last film, Three Colors: Red.

Though he takes an occasional film role, he has, as of late, been focusing essentially on his stage work.

Awards

Trintignant was nominated to receive the César four times: in 1987, 1995, 1996, and in 1999.

Personal life

Trintignant comes from a wealthy family. He is the nephew of race car driver, Louis Trintignant, who was killed in 1933 while practicing on the Péronne racetrack in Picardie. Another uncle, Maurice Trintignant (1917–2005), was a Formula One driver who twice won the Monaco Grand Prix as well as the Le Mans. Raised in and around automobile racing, Jean-Louis Trintignant was the natural choice of film director Claude Lelouch for the starring role of race car driver in the 1966 film, Un homme et une femme. He suffered a leg injury from a motorcycle accident in June 2007.[3]

His first wife was actress Stéphane Audran. His second wife, Nadine Marquand, was also an actress as well as a screenwriter and director. They had three children: Vincent Trintignant, Pauline (who died of crib death in 1969) and Marie Trintignant (21 January 1962 – 1 August 2003). At the age of 17, Marie performed in La terrazza alongside her father and later became a successful actress in her own right. She was killed at the age of 41 by her boyfriend, singer Bertrand Cantat, in a hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Trintignant is good friends with Anouk Aimée. It was he who recommended Aimée to film director Claude Lelouch for the female lead in Un homme et une femme.

Selected filmography

References

External links