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It is one of the last Titans of French cinema who sadly passed this Monday, September 6 at the age of 88 years, leaving a huge void in the hearts of the French. "Monument", "Myth", "National Treasure", so many words come to our minds when thinking about the charisma of the one who was affectionately known as Bébel. After a career of more than half a century, filled with more than 80 movies, Jean-Paul Belmondo will forever remain a popular hero. A whole look back on the actor's career, on his "thousand lives", as he liked to say it himself, seems finally to be an insurmountable task, so much he was everywhere and everything.☞ Pierrot le fou, Un singe en hiver, L'Homme de Rio, À bout de souffle, Flic ou voyou, Le Professionnel, Borsalino...☞ Gabriel Fouquet, Cartouche, Ferdinand Griffon, Louis Mahé, François Capella, François Merlin, Stanislas Borrowitz, Michel Poiccard, Adrien Dufourquet...☞ Philippe de Broca, Michel Allegret, Jean-Luc Godart, Henri Verneuil, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Deray, François Truffaut, Georges Lautner, Claude Lelouch...☞ Jean Gabin, Claudia Cardinale, Jean Rochefort, Ana Karina, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve...Films, characters, extraordinary collaborations both in front of and behind the camera: it would seem that everything in Belmondo's career is now absolutely cult. Intrepid actor, navigating with an incredible ease between popular cinema and films d'auteur, it is difficult to find a string that was not in his bow! His filmography is indeed as prolific as eclectic: he participates in the birth of the Nouvelle Vague with, for example, À bout de souffle and Pierrot le fou, he was (obviously) successful in the registers of adventure and comedy (L'Homme de Rio, Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine... ), tries his hand at cloak and dagger films (Cartouche), masters the drama (La Sirène du Mississipi) as well as the action film (L'As des As), is a master of the detective story (Borsalino) and even launches into the parody of espionage (Casino Royale). We can undoubtedly speak of a trajectory that could not be more unusual, but which fits so well with the ardor of Belmondo.
Born in 1933 in Neuilly-sur-Scène of a sculptor father and a painter mother, nothing predestined Jean-Paul Belmondo to burst the big screen. Indeed, little interested in studies, he is first passionate about sports. From soccer to cycling through boxing, which he will practice at a high level (and as always, with success), he draws predispositions that will lead him to his trademark in cinema: the execution of his own stunts, in the total absence of double. Easy, according to him, when you have "good legs and no fear of heights". Sometimes a tightrope walker, sometimes a parachute jumper and often a brawler, Jean-Paul Belmondo's appetite for strong emotions never ceases to delight the eyes of spectators, but it is above all his own happiness that it feeds: "When I was young, I hesitated between a career in sports or in acting, and with this kind of cinema I do both, so I am a fulfilled man".
Sport or acting, but also (and especially?!) theater or cinema? Indeed, in addition to sports, the heart of young Belmondo also beats for the theater. It was in front of a performance of Molière's Femmes Savantes at the Comédie Française in 1946 that he made the irrevocable decision to become an actor at only 13 years old. In an interview given in 2001, Belmondo returned to his first love for the stage: "When I felt like acting, it took me very young, I thought of the theater. I never thought of the cinema. (...) The cinema arrived by chance in my life". And what a happy chance for all of us!
Throughout his life and his career, Jean-Paul Belmondo builds his own myth without even seeming to think about it, between casualness and fantasy. From the stage to the big screen, his countless successes systematically become classics. He imposes his sunny attitude in all French cinema and becomes an icon whose love carried by the public seems unconditional.If we can think that Jean-Paul Belmondo takes with him a whole part of French cinema, it is however nothing. The films remain and they are eternal, and it is for ever that he will live on the screen, just like our dear Piccoli, de Funès and Bacri.
