In memoriam: Michel Blanc (Telegraph 14/10/24)

Michel Blanc, who has died aged 72, was a jovial, much-loved lynchpin of French stage and screen who numbers among a select group of creatives, having won prizes at the Cannes film festival for work both before and behind the camera. 

Blanc shared the festival’s Best Actor laurels for his hilarious turn as a mild-mannered husband nudged towards criminality and transvestism by a hulking Gérard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier’s brusque comedy Tenue de soirée/Evening Dress (1986). This was a banner year for short, balding performers proposing alternative models of masculinity: Blanc’s fellow honouree was Bob Hoskins, playing the lovelorn gangland chauffeur in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. 

Later, Blanc and Blier collected the Best Screenplay gong for the in-jokey Grosse fatigue/Dead Tired (1994), which saw Blanc both directing and playing (a version of) himself: a successful actor called Michel Blanc whose life unravels upon learning a doppelganger has been abusing his celebrity perks. Roger Ebert opened his review with an elevated form of praise: “Whenever I see Michel Blanc in a movie, I rejoice that he exists. He seems such an unlikely candidate for movie stardom.” 

If Blanc remained a French phenomenon – never breaking through internationally as Depardieu did – his films sporadically crossed the Channel to general acclaim, most memorably Monsieur Hire (1989), Patrice Leconte’s adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel. Here, Blanc excelled in a dramatic role as a lonely oddball accused of murder; Ebert noted the character “seems to have been sprouted in a basement”.

In actuality, Michel Jean François Blanc was born in Courbevoie in the Hauts-de-Seine region of France on April 16, 1952, the only child of removals man Marcel Blanc and his typist wife Jeanine (née Billon). His was, however, a sheltered childhood, a consequence of being diagnosed with a heart murmur: “I was constantly told that I was fragile, which is not reassuring.”

Blanc studied at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he and his friends made a quiet form of mischief: “I was shy and discreet, so I often slipped through the cracks. But it’s true that we liked to make fun of the teachers, especially the one who had stuck us in the front row and who, as a result, couldn't see our faces anymore, since his desk was on the stage. So we did stupid things to make the class laugh.”

Blanc made his screen debut in the fantasy Les filles de Malemort (1974) and his distinctive looks soon attracted notable directors: he was Louis XV’s valet in Bertrand Tavernier’s Que la fête commence/Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975) and one of the neighbours in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976). Yet his biggest success followed with his old school pals, with whom Blanc formed the theatrical collective Splendid. 

The group, which included fellow actor-directors Josiane Balasko and Gérard Jugnot, exploded onto the 1970s Parisian café-theatre scene, eventually taking up permanent residence at Le Splendid on the Rue du Faubourg. Their first film Les Bronzés (1978), set around a Club Med resort on the Ivory Coast, became a major local hit, fixing Blanc in the French imagination as the fumbling bachelor Jean-Claude Dusse (“I was afraid I would be associated with him for the rest of my life”).

Sequels followed in 1979 and 2006, but Blanc resisted typecasting. In the 1990s, he gravitated towards name directors: after reuniting with Blier for Merci la vie (1991), he played Alonso in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), and the ineffectual Inspector Forget in Robert Altman’s fashion-world flop Prêt-à-Porter (1994).

In the new century, he worked with André Téchiné on The Witnesses (2008) and The Girl on the Train (2009), lent César-winning support as a ministerial aide in the procedural L’Exercice de l’État (2011), and was appreciably sly as the mayor moderating the gastronomic turf war between Michelin-starred Helen Mirren and Indian arrivistes in Lasse Hallström’s TheHundred-Foot Journey (2014).

The Splendid troupers reunited to receive an honorary César in 2021, after which Blanc returned to leavening popular comedy, playing a bluff sixtysomething belatedly registering for school in Les petites victoires (2023). His final screen appearance will be as the grandfather in an adaptation of Christophe Boltanski’s novel La cache (2025 tbc).

After striking box-office gold with his directorial debut, the buddy comedy Marche à l'ombre (1984), Blanc occasionally returned behind the camera: he cast Daniel Auteuil as a befuddled gigolo in the London-set The Escort (1999) and adapted the British novelist Joseph Connolly for Embrassez qui vous voudrez/Summer Things (2002) and Voyez comme on danse/Kiss & Tell (2018).

“I’m not a sad clown,” Blanc once joked, “I’m a worried clown.” In 2015, he told Paris-Match just what his worries were: “I am afraid of death. I do as many things as possible so as not to have time to think about it. And yet I think about it. When I get to the end of a shoot, I often say to myself: ‘Well, if I disappeared now, they could still edit the film.’ As if the idea of ​​a duty accomplished reassured me.”

He is survived by a long-term partner, the designer Ramatoulaye Diop.

Michel Blanc, born April 16, 1952, died October 4, 2024.