The actor Pierre Vernier died last Wednesday at the age of 93, his relatives announced.
A member of the Bande du Conservatoire, he had played in numerous films with Jean-Paul Belmondo.
On television, he won several awards for his portrayal of General De Gaulle in 2009.
He was one of those actors whose name is not necessarily known to the general public, but whose face and appearance – tall gentleman’s stature, dreamy face and brown lock on his forehead – are familiar to him. The actor Pierre Vernier died on Wednesday at the age of 93 in Vic-Fezensac, in Gers, AFP learned on Saturday from his relatives.
With Françoise Fabian, he was one of the last surviving members of the famous Bande du Conservatoire, essentially formed by students of the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris in the early 1950s. Besides Jean-Paul Belmondo, his core, it also included Jean Rochefort, Claude Rich, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Bruno Cremer and Annie Girardot.
A prolific actor, Pierre Vernier would appear in around sixty films, including a good number of popular successes alongside Bébel such as The professional de Georges Lautner in 1981 or Itinerary of a spoiled child de Claude Lelouch in 1988. “Be careful, I also exist without him!“, he had fun saying in 2001 about the one he considered to be “embodied professional conscience“.
Born Pierre Louis Rayer in Saint-Jean d’Angely in Charente, he had also worked with great film directors, including Henri Verneuil in I… comme Icare in 1979 or Joseph Losey in Monsieur Klein with Alain Delon in 1976. This horse lover was also very active on television. In 2009, he received several awards for the television film Farewell de Gaulle, farewell on Canal +.
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On the small screen, Pierre Vernier made his name in 1964 playing the role of a vigilante in the soap opera “Rocambole”. In the theater, he had played under the direction of Raymond Rouleau, Georges Wilson, Jean-Louis Barrault and Roger Planchon. Knight of the National Order of Merit, he was very involved until the end of his life in the associative and charitable sector, underlined those around him.
