07 September 2021 | Culture
Adieu au magnifique Belmondo
The iconic French actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo has died at the age of 88.
Belmondo’s face was superbly handsome, rough-hewn, earthily sexy and real. He had a broken nose from his amateur boxing career and full, badly moulded lips,
For director Jean-Luc Godard, in movies like Breathless and his later Pierrot Le Fou, Belmondo was the archetypal gangster and tough guy, enriched with cerebral, thoughtful and comic dimensions of self-awareness.
He played variants of this role for the rest of his career: adventurer, mobster, sometimes a cop himself, often opposite his longtime sparring partner Alain Delon – and often in larky, humorous entertainments. Belmondo was a French star to the bone: he showed no aptitude for or interest in learning English and making it in Hollywood like Charles Boyer or Maurice Chevalier.
The eternally handsome, romantic Belmondo is an integral part of the history of French cinema, and France itself.
