Michel Piccoli, one of the most original and versatile French actors of the last half century, has died aged 94, his family said Monday.
He died “in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his children Inord and Missia after a stroke”, the family told AFP.
Piccoli — who passed on May 12 — starred in a string of classics which redefined world cinema, from Luis Bunuel’s “Belle de Jour” and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” to a typically memorable turn opposite Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” in 1963.
Bardot said that though she and the left-wing Piccoli were polar opposites politically, they shared great “mutual esteem”.
“He had humour and talent,” she told AFP. “And he liked my backside,” she added cryptically.
A masterful performer with a wickedly malicious edge, Piccoli managed to carve out a hugely prolific career as both an arthouse icon and a kind of French Cary Grant.
Like Grant and other Hollywood all-rounders Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, Piccoli was able to adapt himself to virtually any material without altering his essential everyman screen persona.
Emmanuel Macron called Piccoli a “giant” in the industry who, with “his immense power of metamorphosis,” was “the most complete and most eclectic actors in French cinema,” according to a statement from the French presidency.
“You did not direct Piccoli. You filmed him,” said Gilles Jacob, the former head of the Cannes film festival, who led the tributes to a man who he said was “as indispensable to France as water, sun and wind”.
