Michel Piccoli

Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli (27 December 1925 – 12 May 2020) was a French actor, producer and film director with a career spanning 70 years. He was lauded as one of the greatest French character actors of his generation who played a wide variety of roles and worked with many acclaimed directors, being awarded with a Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival and a Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival.

Life and career

Piccoli was born in Paris to a musical family; his mother was a pianist and his father was a violinist whose grandfather was from the canton of Ticino.

He appeared in many different roles, from seducer to cop to gangster to Pope, in more than 170 movies. He appeared in six films directed by Luis Buñuel including Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), but also appeared as Brigitte Bardot's husband in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) and as the main antagonist in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz (1969). He also appeared in many films by Claude Sautet, sometimes co-starring in them with Romy Schneider, and became a frequent collaborator of director Marco Ferreri, with whom he worked on several films, including Dillinger Is Dead and La Grande Bouffe. In 1973 he starred in Luis García Berlanga's Grandeur nature (Life Size), a controversial film that suffered censorship during the Franco era and was not released in Spain until 1978.

In the 1990s, Piccoli also worked as a director on three films. One of his last leading roles was his portrayal of a depressed, newly elected pope in Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope (2011), for which he was awarded with the David di Donatello Award for Best Actor.