Paradoxically, for an actor whose film persona was so introverted, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who has died aged 91, made a strong impact in films for more than half a century. His reticence, slight build, limpid eyes and pale complexion, which gave his handsome features a certain blankness, enabled directors to get him to express more by doing less. “The best actors in the world are those who feel the most and show the least,” he once remarked.
This was demonstrable in Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning Amour (2012), which was written for Trintignant, who suggested the film’s title. As the elderly, devoted husband Georges, watching his wife (Emmanuelle Riva) gradually decline in physical and mental health, Trintignant subtly balanced affection, irritation and pity.
The film that established his international reputation was Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et Une Femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966), in which he played a racing-driver who falls in love with a script supervisor (Anouk Aimée), both of them widowed. This ultra-chic love story gained from the easy charm of the two stars, and the popular “daba-daba-da” musical theme. Trintignant, Aimée and Lelouch were reunited for a sequel 20 years later.
But if one were to choose a performance that encapsulated his talent, it would have to be his portrayal of the title role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), though he was dubbed into Italian. In this ironic and stylish study of pre-second world war Italy, Trintignant played a professor whose childhood trauma and repressed homosexuality contribute to his decision to enter into a bourgeois marriage and offer his services to the fascist party.
When he is asked to assassinate his former teacher, the leader of an anti-fascist group, his guilt, sycophancy and doubts about his mission are depicted in self-consciously studied movements and a thin, self-absorbed smile. In a way, he suffers from what the Italians call dubbio amletico (Hamlet’s indecision); Trintignant played Hamlet on stage in Paris, both early (1957) and later (1970) in his career.
Trintignant, who was born in the Vaucluse area in southern France, the son of Raoul Trintignant, a wealthy businessman, and Claire (nee Tourtin), arrived in Paris as a shy 20-year-old to study acting with the famed Charles Dullin and then Tania Balachova, initially to gain confidence and to get rid of his provincial accent. In fact, he was more interested in becoming a racing driver like his uncles – Louis, who died in a racetrack crash, and Maurice, who won Le Mans in 1954. Jean-Louis raced as a hobby.
In the early 1950s, he began to get stage roles, and his first film part was in Christian-Jaque’s Si Tous les Gars du Monde (Race for Life, 1956), as a young amateur radio operator getting signals from a ship on which fishermen are dying of food poisoning.
He was then cast opposite Brigitte Bardot, as the deceived husband in Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu … Créa la Femme (And God Created Woman, 1956). In real life, it was Vadim, Bardot’s husband, who was being deceived by BB and Trintignant, who had a widely publicised affair. Because it was the film that brought French films out of the arthouse and into the mainstream, Trintignant was seen throughout the world, though it was Bardot whom the public flocked to see. However, any impetus the film might have given his career was lost because he was drafted into military service in Algiers for almost three years.
In 1959, he made a comeback thanks to a magnanimous Vadim, who cast him as the trusting Danceny in his New Wave updating of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Now established on screen as a vulnerable, inexperienced young man, he played an idle rich kid seduced by an older war widow (Eleonora Rossi Drago) in the Italy of 1943 in Valerio Zurlini’s Estate Violenta (Violent Summer, 1959).
Trintignant was extremely active in the 1960s, making an average of about four films a year, most often acting with understated intensity. Among the more interesting were two train films, Costa-Gavras’s Compartiment Tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders, 1965), in which he is not what he seems on the surface, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express (1966) in which he played, against type, a sadistic drug smuggler.
After Un Homme et Une Femme came several of Trintignant’s most complex and subtle performances. In Chabrol’s cool, callous and witty study of a menage a trois, Les Biches (1968), he played an architect who causes a rift in a lesbian relationship between a rich and beautiful woman (Stéphane Audran) and a student (Jacqueline Sassard). The film had an added frisson because Audran, Chabrol’s wife, had been married to Trintignant for a short period several years earlier.
In 1960, Trintignant had married Nadine Marquand, who became a director, several of whose films starred her husband, their professional relationship continuing even after their divorce in 1976.
For his role as the principled investigating magistrate in Costa-Gavras’ political thriller Z (1969), Trintignant won the best actor prize at Cannes, and he ended the decade on a high note in Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night With Maud, 1969) with his wittiest portrayal of an insecure man. He played Jean-Louis, an engineer and a devout Catholic determined to remain “pure” before his marriage to a young woman he has noticed in church, who spends a chaste night with the beautiful, dark, free-thinking Maud (Françoise Fabian).
Bertolucci offered Trintignant the lead in Last Tango in Paris, but he turned it down because of the nudity. “Love scenes embarrass me,” he said. “I’m not an exhibitionist.” Over the following years, the quality of his films declined somewhat, though he expanded his range in a number of commercial thrillers as psychologically disturbed characters. He took on these roles in order “to counteract my own good nature”. To bring out his bad side, Trintignant played poker – “an evil game. If you want to win you have to be vicious.”
He was cast by François Truffaut in the director’s last film, Vivement Dimanche! (Finally Sunday!/Confidentially Yours, 1983), an attempt to capture the style of 1940s Hollywood film noir. He was also in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s last film, Three Colours Red (1994), as an embittered, reclusive and retired judge, one of several misanthropic and cynical characters he played in his later years. He returned to the stage in William Gibson’s Two for the Seesaw, AR Gurney’s Love Letters and Yasmina Reza’s Art.
His stark role in Amour reminded audiences and critics of what a superb actor he was. Trintignant waited five years before returning to the screen to be reunited with Haneke for Happy End (2017), in which he played a man with dementia who wishes to end his life. Despite announcing his retirement from acting in 2018, he took one further role, in Lelouch’s The Best Years of a Life (2019), another sequel to A Man and a Woman.
Trintignant is survived by his third wife, Marianne Hoepfner, and by his son, Vincent, one of the three children from his second marriage. One of his daughters, Pauline, died as a baby, while Trintignant and his family were on location in Rome in 1969; the other, the actor Marie Trintignant, was killed by her partner, the rock star Bertrand Cantat, in 2003.
• Jean-Louis Trintignant, actor, born 11 December 1930; died 17 June 2022
• Ronald Bergan died in 2020
