The legendary French cinema star whose career was draped in sadness after the deaths of his two daughters and who had made discretion his trademark died ‘peacefully, surrounded by his family.’
Jean-Louis Trintignant, who has died aged 91, was one of France’s greatest actors whose life was plunged into tragedy by the murder of his daughter at the hands of her pop star boyfriend.
Mr. Trintignant was devastated when Marie, an actress, was beaten to death by rock star Bertrand Cantat in a hotel room in Lithuania in 2003.
Yet, nine years later, he returned in triumph in Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning Amour, playing a man in his eighties struggling to look after his wife after she suffers a stroke.
It also won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, where Mr. Trintignant subsequently made a final emotional return in 2019 aged 88, despite being weakened by cancer for a sequel of A Man and a Woman, the 1966 love story that made his name.
The actor had lost another daughter, Pauline, when she was a baby. But Mr. Trintignant refused to give in to bitterness. One of France’s best-known and most prolific actors, Mr. Trintignant starred in some 130 films including such classics as Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red, Costa-Gavras’ Z and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.
Despite his success and his much-remarked-upon versatility, Mr. Trintignant was a shy and reserved perfectionist, describing himself as “deeply inhibited with a perpetual bad conscience.”
The actor died “peacefully, of old age, this morning at home in the Gard, surrounded by his loved ones,” his wife Mariane Hoepfner Trintignant said in a statement sent by his agent.
