Philippe Noiret Biography

French actor

Philippe Noiret (French pronunciation: ; 1 October 1930 – 23 November 2006) was a French film actor.

Life and career

Noiret in 1951.

Noiret was born in Lille, France, the son of Lucy (Heirman) and Pierre Noiret, a clothing company representative. He was an indifferent student and attended several prestigious Paris schools, including the Lycée Janson de Sailly. He failed several times to p* his baccalauréat exams, so he decided to study theater. He trained at the Centre Dramatique de l'Ouest and toured with the Théâtre National Populaire for seven years, where he met Monique Chaumette, whom he married in 1962. During that time he developed a career as a nightclub comedian in a duo act with Jean-Pierre Darras, in which he played Louis XIV in an extravagant wig opposite Darras as the dramatist Jean Racine. In these roles they satirized the politics of Charles de Gaulle, Michel Debré and André Malraux.

Noiret's screen debut (1949) was an uncredited role in Gigi. In 1955 he appeared in La Pointe Courte directed by Agnès Varda. She said later, "I discovered in him a breadth of talent rare in a young actor." Sporting a pudding-basin haircut, Noiret played a lovelorn youth in the southern fishing port of Sète. He later admitted: "I was scared stiff, and fumbled my way through the part—I am totally absent in the film." He was not cast again until 1960 in Zazie dans le Métro. After playing second leads in Georges Franju's Thérèse Desqueyroux in 1962, and in Le Capitaine Frac*e, from Théophile Gautier's romantic adventure, he became a regular on the French screen, without being cast in major roles until A Matter of Resistance directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau in 1966. He became a star in France with Yves Robert's Alexandre le Bienheureux.

"When I began to have success in the movies," Noiret told film critic Joe Leydon at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989, "it was a big surprise for me. For actors of my generation—all the men of 50 or 60 now in French movies—all of us were thinking of being stage actors. Even people like Jean-Paul Belmondo, all of us, we never thought we'd become movie stars. So, at the beginning, I was just doing it for the money, and because they asked me to do it. But after two or three years of working on movies, I started to enjoy it, and to be very interested in it. And I'm still very interested in it, because I've never really understood how it works. I mean, what is acting for the movies? I've never really understood."

Noiret was cast primarily as the Everyman character, although he did not hesitate to accept controversial roles, such as in La Grande Bouffe, a film about suicide by overeating, which caused a scandal at Cannes in 1973, and in 1991 André Téchiné cast Noiret in J'embr*e pas (I Don't Kiss), as a melancholy old *sexual obsessed with young male flesh. And in 1987, in The Gold Rimmed Gl*es based on Giorgio B*ani's novel about the cramped social life of post-war Ferrara in Italy, he played an elderly and respectable doctor who is gradually suspected of being a covert *sexual with a p*ion for a beautiful young man (Rupert Everett). Noiret won his first César Award for his role in Vieux Fusil in 1976. His second César came in 1990 for his role in Life and Nothing But.

Noiret appeared in Hollywood-financed films by Alfred Hitch* (Topaz), George Cukor (Justine), Ted Kotcheff (Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?), Peter Yates (Murphy's War) and Anatole Litvak (The Night of the Generals). But he may be best known for his roles as Alfredo in Cinema Paradiso (1988), Pablo Neruda in Il Postino, and Major Dellaplane in Bertrand Tavernier's Life and Nothing But.

Noiret in 2003 at the Cannes Film Festival.

By the time of his death from cancer in Paris in 2006, aged 76, Noiret had more than 100 film roles to his credit. He often joked with interviewers about his virtually non-stop work schedule, telling Joe Leydon in 1989: "You never know what will be the success of a film. And it's always comfortable to be making another film when you're reading terrible notices for your last film. You can say, 'Well, that's a pity, but I'm already working on another job.' It helps in your living. You see, if you're only making one film a year, or one film every year and a half, it's hard. Because when it's a failure, what do you do? What do you become? You're dead."

Awards

• BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role
  • 1990 – Nuovo Cinema Paradiso
• César Award for Best Actor
  • 1976 – Le Vieux Fusil
  • 1990 – La Vie et rien d'autre

Selected filmography

Main article: Philippe Noiret filmography

References

External links

• Philippe Noiret at IMDb
• Guardian obituary
• Times obituary
• Philippe Noiret at Find a Grave

1968–present

• Spencer Tracy (1968)
• Dustin Hoffman (1969)
• Robert Redford (1970)
• Peter Finch (1971)
• Gene Hackman (1972)
• Walter Matthau (1973)
• Jack Nicholson (1974)
• Al Pacino (1975)
• Jack Nicholson (1976)
• Peter Finch (1977)
• Richard Dreyfuss (1978)
• Jack Lemmon (1979)
• John Hurt (1980)
• Burt Lancaster (1981)
• Ben Kingsley (1982)
• Michael Caine / Dustin Hoffman (1983)
• Haing S. Ngor (1984)
• William Hurt (1985)
• Bob Hoskins (1986)
• Sean Connery (1987)
• John Cleese (1988)
• Daniel Day-Lewis (1989)
• Philippe Noiret (1990)
• Anthony Hopkins (1991)
• Robert Downey Jr. (1992)
• Anthony Hopkins (1993)
• Hugh Grant (1994)
• Nigel Hawthorne (1995)
• Geoffrey Rush (1996)
• Robert Carlyle (1997)
• Roberto Benigni (1998)
• Kevin Spacey (1999)
• Jamie Bell (2000)
• Russell Crowe (2001)
• Daniel Day-Lewis (2002)
• Bill Murray (2003)
• Jamie Foxx (2004)
• Philip Seymour Hoffman (2005)
• Forest Whitaker (2006)
• Daniel Day-Lewis (2007)
• Mickey Rourke (2008)
• Colin Firth (2009)
• Colin Firth (2010)
• Jean Dujardin (2011)
• Daniel Day-Lewis (2012)
• Chiwetel Ejiofor (2013)
• Eddie Redmayne (2014)
• Leonardo DiCaprio (2015)
• Casey Affleck (2016)
• Gary Oldman (2017)
• Rami Malek (2018)
• Joaquin Phoenix (2019)
• Anthony Hopkins (2020)
• Will Smith (2021)
• Austin Butler (2022)
• Cillian Murphy (2023)