Inhabited by an almost mystical passion for the profession of actor, Michel Bouquet, who died on April 13 at the age of 96, leaves the image of a legend of the theater at the end of a career that has begun. during the last war. His spaced out, but always noticed, incursions into cinema and television had made him even better known to the general public.
Unlike Alain Delon, to whom he gave the line twice in the cinema (Deux Hommes Dans La Ville, Borsalino) and who admitted to having become an actor ” by accident “, Michel Bouquet had entered the profession as one enters the orders, pushed by an almost supernatural force. With the talent that was his, the tireless servant of great texts in the theater had recounted the key scene of his existence in a fascinating interview granted to Annick Cojean from World in April 2016, description of which we want to share a few excerpts as it is both cinematic and revealing of the character.
” I’m still unable to explain what came over me that dayhe confided to the journalist of the World. A strange impulse. We were in 1943, in full Occupation. I worked at the Bourbonneux pastry chef, in front of the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris, and I lived with my mother who ran a fashion business at 11, rue de la Boétie. She had recommended that I go to mass and I had wisely taken the road to the church of Saint-Augustin. And then, at the end of the street, I forked “.
The boards of salvation
” I turned onto boulevard Malesherbes, in the opposite direction to the church, reached Concorde and engulfed myself under the arcades of rue de Rivoli as far as number 190, an address unearthed in a directory, which I had jotted down on a small piece of paper, in my pocket for several dayscontinued the actor in this same interview. I knocked at the concierge and asked for M. Maurice Escande, the great actor of the Comédie-Française. “He lives on the top floor, you can’t go wrong, there’s only one apartment.” I rang. I was not yet 17 “.
The rest of the story is just as tasty, you just have to find it in the archives of the World to taste it. We are nevertheless struck by this confidence at the end of the interview because it sums up Michel Bouquet: “ This is also called vocation. She exists. And when you have the chance to discover it, I assure you that you are no longer alone in life. But beware ! She demands everything! It is sacred and seals your fate. Mine was to put myself at the disposal of the authors and to serve them as best as possible.. »
This all-consuming passion for acting and this fervent devotion to the texts of the great authors, Michel Bouquet will have practiced them throughout a career which extended from the 1940s until, so to speak, his last breath, he who still filled the rooms at the age of 90 , after having sworn in 2011, at the age of 86, not to go back on the boards, tired by a tour of several hundred performances of the play Le Roi Se Meurt by Eugène Ionesco, one of his favorite plays. “ I’ll do a bit of cinema, he had said. I love that. It is not the same. In the theater, it’s a two-hour ordeal “. He took advantage of this escapade to shoot the magnificent Renoir by Gilles Bourdos, a film which represented France at the Oscars in 2014 and which earned him a third nomination for the César for best actor, the same year. But the demon of the theater had taken over and he was back on stage in 2012.
It was his mother, a milliner of modest origins, who introduced him to great plays by taking him to the Opéra-Comique and the Comédie-Française every Sunday. In this Paris of the inter-war period, little Michel led a bleak and featureless existence marked by a period in boarding school from the age of seven and summers working in the fields in the countryside to help his uncles and aunts. The arrival of the war darkened his horizons a little more when his father – who had already fought in the 14-18 war – was taken prisoner at the start of the conflict and was sent to Pomerania.
” But still, all that, the pension, the absence of a father, of a mother, I would have gotten away with it anyway, I thinkhe confided in another interview with Worldin 2010. But the war on top of that… I kept the awareness that you can lose everything all of a sudden, your freedom, your loved ones, your faith in life, and even what you are. It was worse than despair: an annihilation, a breakdown of any kind of belief in anything. »
quest for perfection
By reading these words, we already understand better the origin of the force that guided Michel Bouquet towards the theater, an energy of inextinguishable despair after having ” do jobs that I didn’t want to do “: baker, apprentice mechanic, bank employee. Incubated by Maurice Escande, he soon found a place at the Conservatoire where he entered in September 1943, at the same time as Gérard Philipe.
The dark Michel and the flamboyant Gérard will become friends. ” As much as I was needy, recalled Michel Bouquet in another interview, as much Gérard played with a luminous obviousness, a disconcerting ease. He was as sunny as I was dark. He was working more on life, and I was splitting my hair trying to figure out what the author had meant.r. »
This attention to detail pushed to the extreme, this perpetual quest for perfection will remain the actor’s trademark throughout his career. After a few appearances in secondary roles, notably in Tartuffe, he participated in the creation of Roméo et Jeannette by Jean Anouilh in 1946, one of the contemporary authors to whom he would be closest with Albert Camus, whom he had known the previous year. by playing Scipio in Caligula and of which he will be one of the performers in Les Justes in 1949 alongside Maria Casarès and Serge Reggiani then in Les Possessed in 1959.
Another decisive encounter: Jean Vilar, the director and creator of the Festival d’Avignon, whom he joined from the first edition of the festival in 1947 in La Terrasse de Midi by Maurice Clavel, which Vilar directed. From then on, Michel Bouquet will become a regular at an event in Avignon which continues to grow in importance and where he will perform between 1950 and 1963 Shakespeare’s Henri IV and Richard II, The Doctor Despite Him, Dom Juan and L’Avare by Molière, then Murder in the Cathedral of TS Elliott. Very close to Jean Vilar, Michel Bouquet performs a lot in the Paris region of course and in particular at the TNP and Chaillot with a predisposition for plays by Molière, Shakespeare, Anouilh, Ionesco and Harold Pinter (1930-2008 ), the future Nobel Prize for Literature, whose work he helped to promote in France.
At the end of the 1970s, he was also appointed professor at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art, a veritable nursery from which dozens of leading French actors and actresses of several generations would come, an establishment where he would continue to teach until 1990.” The art of acting is not the art of feeling but the art of thinking. » he will often repeat, during courses on the profession that his accomplice Georges Werler had the good idea to record during the 1986-1987 season and of which a compilation appears on a unanimously acclaimed CD.
Success on the big and small screen
In addition to his seven decades of presence on the boards, Michel Bouquet has also exercised his talents in the cinema from the start of his career, but also on television, in particular with the recording of some of his plays but not only, as well as in many documentaries, his fluid and precise diction lending itself particularly well to this exercise. It is him, for example, that we hear in voice-over in Nuit et Brouillard, by Alain Resnais (1956). In the cinema, his most prolific period was that of the 1970s, a decade during which he shot in about thirty films, almost half of his roles on the big screen.
His first role in front of the camera had been that of a tuberculosis patient in Monsieur Vincent, an early “biopic” on Saint Vincent de Paul which had fallen into oblivion but which was the greatest success of the year 1947 in rooms. His film appearances became more frequent from the mid-1960s, when he filmed twice with François Truffaut (The Bride Was in Black, The Mississippi Mermaid) and where he became one of the favorite actors of Claude Chabrol (The Road to Corinth, The Unfaithful Woman, The Rupture, Just Before Nightfall, then later Chicken In Vinegar). A specialist in the troubled roles of rejected bourgeois, crooked notables, petty cops, he gives, in the opinion of many, the most accurate interpretation of the character of Inspector Javert in the 1982 version of Les Miserables shot by Robert Hossein.
Knowing how to vary the styles, we find him later with delight in 1991 in Toto le Héros dramatic comedy by Jaco Van Dormael in which he plays the leading role and which will become cult. He was later rewarded with two Césars for Best Actor for Comment I Killed My Father by Anne Fontaine (2002) and for Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars by Robert Guédiguian (2006), a film in which he slips happily in the skin of a François Mitterrand at the twilight of his life. Awarded two Molière du actor awards in 1998 for Les Côtelettes and in 2005 for The King is Dying as well as an honorary Molière for his entire career, Michel Bouquet was married to the actress Ariane Borg, from whom he separated in 1967, then to Juliette Carré, married in 1970, an actress with whom he shared the stage and the tours on many occasions.