Jean-Louis Trintignant - Life and Career

Life and Career

Trintignant was born in Piolenc, Vaucluse, France, the son of Claire (née Tourtin) and Raoul Trintignant, an industrialist. At the age of twenty, Trintignant moved to Paris to study drama, and made his theatrical debut in 1951 going on to be seen as one of the most gifted French actors of the post-war era. After touring in the early 1950s in several theater productions, his first motion picture appearance came in 1955 and the following year he gained stardom with his performance opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman.

Trintignant’s acting was interrupted for several years by mandatory military service. After serving in Algiers, he returned to Paris and resumed his work in film.

Trintignant had the leading male role in the art-house classic A Man and a Woman, which at the time was the most successful French film ever screened in the foreign market.

In Italy, he was always dubbed into Italian, and his work stretched into collaborations with renowned Italian directors, including Valerio Zurlini in Summer Violent and The Desert of the Tartars, Ettore Scola in La terrazza, Bernardo Bertolucci in The Conformist, and Dino Risi in the cult film The Easy Life.

Throughout the 1970s, Trintignant starred in numerous films and in 1983 he made his first English language feature film, Under Fire. Following this, he starred in François Truffaut's final film, Confidentially Yours.

In 1994, he starred in Krzysztof Kieślowski's last film, Three Colors: Red.

Though he takes an occasional film role, he has, as of late, been focusing essentially on his stage work.

Read more about this topic:  Jean-Louis Trintignant

Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:

    I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Had I but died an hour before this chance
    I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
    There’s nothing serious in mortality.
    All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead;
    The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
    Is left this vault to brag of.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.
    Jessie Bernard (20th century)