Michel Piccoli

Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli (* December 27, 1925 in Paris ) is a French stage and film actor. In addition, he also worked as a screenwriter, director and producer. Piccoli is considered one of the greatest character actors of France.

Life and career

Michel Piccoli is the son of a family of musicians of Italian origin who lived in Paris for several generations. His father was a violinist Henri Piccoli and his mother, Marcelle Expert Bezançon pianist. Piccoli attended the Collège d' annel, the École alsacienne and the Collège Sainte -Barbe in Paris and then studied acting under René Simon. As a student he had previously participated in various amateur performances. After his training as an actor he has performed at various Parisian theaters and was for a time director of the Théâtre de Babylone.

In 1944 he made ​​his film debut. He played under renowned directors, initially often only in small roles, including Luis Buñuel in La Mort en ce jardin (1956 ) and The Witches of Salem ( 1957). His first leading role was the character of a writer in Contempt (1963 ) by Jean -Luc Godard. Piccoli often played abysmal representatives of civil society in the border area to anarchism. As impressive performances are his roles as an anarchist proletarians in wordless Themroc by Claude Faraldo as well as in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour - Beauty of the Day as suspicious Bourgeois. From the late 1960s he was frequently co-star Romy Schneider and the 1982 also in her last film The walker of Sans Souci with.

In addition to his film work Piccoli joined continue on in theater productions and was to be seen among others in productions by Luc Bondy, Peter Brook and Robert Wilson. In 2007 he was appointed to the jury of the 60th Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for his starring role as Henri Husson in Manoel de Oliveira's Belle toujours drama for the European Film Awards.

Like several other film and theater colleagues also Piccoli engaged in the political left in France. So he sits down and for Amnesty International about the communist and pacifist Mouvement de la Paix. In 2007 he assisted in a call, which was signed by 150 intellectuals and artists, the socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal.

Piccoli was married from 1966 to 1977 with Juliette Greco and since 1978 has been the third marriage in a relationship with the landowner Ludivine Clerc. From his first marriage he has his daughter Anne- Cordélia.

Filmography (selection)

Awards (selection)

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