Jean-Paul Belmondo: How the sensual and enviably stylish star came to epitomise French New Wave cool

With the sad news that legendary French star Jean-Paul Belmondo has died on Monday, aged 88, there is one image that is bound to be recycled again and again in newspapers and on websites – Belmondo with a hat perched at a jaunty angle on his head, a fat cigarette hanging from bottom lip and a look of effortless Gallic insouciance on his features. That is how he appeared as the young would-be gangster in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).

Somehow, at least for international audiences, this is the movie with which Belmondo is still indelibly linked. He had a very lengthy career and appeared in plenty of decent films both in France and abroad. He worked with many leading directors, Jean-Pierre Melville, Louis Malle and François Truffaut among them. He appeared opposite most of the great female stars of his era, among them Brigitte Bardot, Anna Karina, Raquel Welsh, Ursula Andress and Sophia Loren. He did comedies, crime thrillers, period dramas and swashbuckling action films. Nonetheless, when the name “Belmondo” is mentioned, it is still his role in Godard’s New Wave classic opposite the short-cropped, faun-like American star Jean Seberg that springs immediately to mind for most film lovers.

Why? Belmondo was so comfortable in his own body. In Breathless, he had an ease of movement and a sensuality that few other actors could match. He was tough but the machismo was tempered with humour and grace. Like Jean Gabin, the great French star of the previous generation, he had a natural authority regardless of the role he was playing. His contemporary, Alain Delon, was slicker, smoother, but couldn’t match his rough-grained authenticity. Belmondo had once been an amateur boxer and his face had an attractively battered quality. He dressed stylishly, too.

Critics have sometimes likened him to Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart and Steve McQueen but those comparisons don’t ring very true. The tightly wired, snarling Bogart and the cool, impassive McQueen lacked the (for lack of a better cliche) sheer joie de vivre of Belmondo. He was a quintessentially French figure who was never appeared entirely at home when he worked abroad.

Breathless was Belmondo in art-house groove but he had immense popular appeal too. The irony, given that he seemed made for cinema, is that he began his career on the stage. Once he did make the switch to film, he turned himself into the modern-day equivalent of an old matinee idol.

His 1964 adventure romp That Man from Rio, directed by his regular collaborator Philippe de Broca, saw him prancing round Brazil, “running, swimming, diving, jumping, dodging cars and eluding collapsing trees” as The New York Times put it. He was like a cross between Tintin and Indiana Jones as he travelled far and wide trying to rescue his kidnapped fiancée (played by François Dorleac).

His love of the stage remained strong. “I did theatre for 10 years before going into movies and every year I planned to go back. I returned before I became an old man,” he remarked when he did briefly switch mediums again late in his career.

open image in gallery

It’s 20 years now since the stroke that paralysed Belmondo. Typically, he fought back against ailments that would have defeated other less strong-willed actors and soon resumed his career. His name carried such weight and he still had such presence that directors reworked their projects to accommodate his frail condition. The action roles were out but he was still capable of milking the pathos, for example in A Man and His Dog (2008), a remake of Vittorio De Sica’s Neo-Realist classic, Umberto D. The sex symbol here played a frail old man with no money and no home and just his pet dog for company.

Belmondo’s reputation sometimes got in his way. One of his best and least characteristic performances was in Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest (1961), in which he convincingly played a soulful, idealistic priest in wartime France. However, everyone loved him so much as the rugged hero that, in his film career at least, he wasn’t always given the chance to show his chops and prove how far he could stretch himself.

open image in gallery

When Belmondo returned to the Cannes Festival in 2011 after an absence of many years, he was given a rapturous response. No one minded about unseemly events in his private life. No one noticed his physical deterioration. French and international movie fans still saw him as the same irrepressible figure they remembered from Breathless and That Man from Rio. They adored his mischief and his swagger. French cinema hadn’t produced any other star to match him in the intervening years and perhaps it never will.