French screen legend Michel Piccoli, who starred in classics which redefined cinema, dies aged 94
- A masterful performer with a wickedly malicious edge, he managed to carve out a hugely prolific career as both an art house icon and a kind of French Cary Grant
- Piccoli never won a French Oscar – the Cesar – despite being nominated four times but he did win best actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980 for his role in A Leap in the Dark
Michel Piccoli, one of the most original and versatile French actors of the last half-century, has died aged 94, his family said on Monday.
He died “in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his children Inord and Missia after a stroke”, the family said.
A masterful performer with a wickedly malicious edge, he managed to carve out a hugely prolific career as both an art house 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 kind of material without altering his essential everyman screen persona.
With his bald forehead, vast eyebrows and sly grin, he hopped easily from seducer to cop to gangster to pope, with a predilection in the 1970s and 1980s for ambiguous and cynical roles.
Yet despite his omnipresence, with Bunuel alone casting him in six of his films, Piccoli never won a French Oscar – the Cesar – despite being nominated four times including for Louis Malle’s Milou in May and Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse in 1991.
