2024-10-07 18:45:24
At the age of 72, the French actor and director Michel Blanc, who became famous for the role of the unfortunate seducer Jean-Claude in the series of crazy comedies Holiday in France, died. Her first volume was created in the late 1970s and told the story of a group of friends in a holiday camp on the Ivory Coast.
Due to its great success, the film received two sequels, in which the heroes, among other things, skied in the French Val d’Isere. There, too, the unfortunate, bald and thin Jean-Claude with a mustache tried to seduce any pretty woman in his vicinity.
AFP reported the death of its representative, Michel Blanco, this Friday. According to the actor’s agent Laurent Renard, the cause was cardiac arrest. “Michel Blanc astounded us with the versatility he showed as an actor and his directorial skills,” French Culture Minister Rachida Dati said on the X social network, according to which her fellow citizens will never forget the actor.
Blanc started out as a comedian in the Splendid theater group in the 1970s. Thanks to the success of French Vacation, he received other offers in similar positions. He often played hypochondriacs, unfortunates or all kinds of clumsy men.
The box soon became too tight for him. “People on the street shouted at me words from Holiday in French. They weren’t talking to me, but to Jean-Claude. That predestined me to a career I didn’t care about,” he explained, explaining why he went in a different direction.
He expanded his acting repertoire in the late 1970s by collaborating with directors Bertrand Tavernier on the film Let the Celebration Begin… or Roman Polanský on the thriller Tenant.
Michel Blanc in the film The Minister, for which he received the César Award. | Photo: Film Europe
In 1984, he achieved huge success with his directorial debut, March in the Shade, about a pair of friends who are broke and wander around Paris looking for work until they catch a glimpse of a dancer. She takes them on a big trip.
Two years later, Michel Blanc starred alongside Gérard Depardieu in the comedy Evening Dress about a charismatic criminal who charms bickering spouses and convinces them to become his cronies. The role, in which he cross-dressed as a woman, won Michel Blanc an acting award at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Frenchman also played the lead role of a suspicious lonely man in the crime thriller Mr. Hire based on the novel by Georges Simenon, the creator of Commissioner Maigret, or a gay doctor in the 2007 film about the HIV epidemic called Witnesses.
From his later work, Czechs in the new millennium could see, for example, the romantic comedy Líbejte se s kim je libo in cinemas. He directed it and played the sickly jealous husband of the woman played by Charlotte Rampling. In 2002, Blanc personally presented this film at the French Film Festival in Prague. “Perhaps I have a bit of the jealous person in me that I play myself. But I hope that it doesn’t reach that intensity,” he told the Novinky.cz server at the time.
Michel Blanc has been nominated four times for the French César Award for acting. He did not change the nomination until 2012 for his secondary performance in the role of the head of the cabinet of the Minister of Transport, which he embodied in the political thriller The Minister.
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