Michel Piccoli


Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli 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 French mother was a pianist and his Swiss father was a violinist 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 and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but also appeared as Brigitte Bardot's husband in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt and as the main antagonist in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz. 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 which worked on several films, including Dillinger Is Dead and La Grande Bouffe.
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, for which he was awarded with the David di Donatello Award for Best Actor.

Political views

Piccoli was part of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés circle in the 1950s, which included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He was a member of the French Communist Party in this era. A life-long left-winger, he objected to repression in the Soviet bloc, and supported the Solidarity trade union in Poland.

Personal life and death

Piccoli married three times, first to Éléonore Hirt, then for eleven years to the singer Juliette Gréco and finally to Ludivine Clerc. He had one daughter from his first marriage, Anne-Cordélia. He also had two adopted children with Ludivine Clerc.
Piccoli died from complications of a stroke on 12 May 2020, at the age of 94.

Selected filmography

Awards and Nominations

In 2001 he was the recipient of the Europe Theatre Prize.