Michel Blanc died suddenly, after a heart attack, at the age of 72, on the night of Thursday to Friday. Sad and unexpected news, and immediately, for many of us, a myriad of spectator memories. So many sequences, dialogues, situations which reveal the richness of his career, the vast color chart of his playing. Obviously the priceless Jean-Claude Dusse of “Bronzés”, singing at the top of his lungs “Etoile des neiges” alone on his chairlift or distilling his disarming certainties in lines that have become cult – “Listen Bernard, I think that you and I have a bit of the same problem, it’s that we can’t really bet everything on our looks. Especially you”… But also the vulnerable Antoine, fur coat and blonde wig, candid transvestite in “Evening Outfit”. The opaque and disturbing “Monsieur Hire” by Patrice Leconte. The indecipherable chief of staff internally devoured by his charge in “The Exercise of the State”, by Pierre Schoeller, in 2011, a masterful film which earned him his only César in 2012.
In 70 roles, Michel Blanc has highlighted the figure of the antihero in a thousand ways, in comic or dramatic registers. “You have to put all his compositions over the past fifty years end to end, bring together all the elements of the mosaic to measure the extent of his talent,” notes Pierre Schoeller, who describes a man “fine, discreet, sensitive, far removed from worldly play or media”.
Crowned in Cannes
Born in Courbevoie (Hauts-de-Seine) in 1952, Michel Blanc is a child of the middle class and the baby boom. His father is a mover, his mother an accountant. Affected very early by a heart murmur which made him highly hypochondriac, passionate about classical music, he dreamed, as a teenager, of a career as a pianist, before branching off, after leaving high school, towards the café-theatre. The public discovered him at a young age in the cinema, in hugely successful comedies. “Les Bronzés” at the end of the 1970s, “Come to my house, I’m staying with a friend” in 1981, “My wife’s name is come back” in 1982, “Papy is resisting” in 1983… His loser character as bald as he is mustachioed, he becomes a pillar of the Splendid, a group of schoolboy friends, free and carefree, so close to the youth of the 1970s, to whom he remained faithful until the end. One of his last media appearances dates back to the issue dedicated by “Paris Match”, last April, to the 50th anniversary of this joyful troupe.
In the 1980s, Michel Blanc gently and seamlessly detached himself from this collective adventure and the comic strip. He began directing his own films with “Marche à l’ombre” in 1984, then established himself as a performer in a darker, more intimate register. “Evening Outfit”, in 1986, won him the acting prize at Cannes. The Grail! Betrand Blier’s film will be for him what “Tchao Pantin” was for Coluche or “Jean de Florette” for Daniel Auteuil. A turning point, a powerful legitimation in a French cinema more sensitive to dramatic emotions than to comic genius. From then on, he continued to vary his repertoires, while transforming himself physically, as if to erase this scrawny Jean-Claude Dusse through intensive bodybuilding practice.
Michel Blanc also flourished behind the camera, with films like “Grosse fatigue” (1994), “Kiss whoever you want” (2002). He likes to introduce surprise and ambiguity into his humor. “He was a man of words, cultured, profound, an excellent dialogue writer, a good connoisseur of contemporary English theater,” underlines Sophie Avon, writer and film critic who has long worked in these columns. “He told me that at the start of his career, he had briefly studied at the university of letters. This episode demonstrates both his sensitivity to writing and the questions that inhabited him,” explains Pierre Schoeller.
Anxious and hardworking
A hard worker, ultra-discreet about his private life, renowned for his total impermeability to the mirages of the star system, Michel Blanc was also known for his anxiety. “He was not at all the type to wallow in pain, but we felt that he had learned to live and deal with some abysses,” notes Sophie Avon. “He carried with him a certain sadness. This melancholy contributed to the subtlety of his acting,” confirms Emmanuelle Auffret, director of one of the last films in which we saw him, “Les Petites Victoires”, in 2023.
She remembers precisely the day he accepted the role. “It was Friday April 2, 2021. I sent him the script by courier at 11 a.m. I expected to receive a response weeks later. This is often the case in cinema. He called me at 3 p.m. to tell me not only that he was excited and up for it, but also that he was scared to death and hoped he could live up to it. You realize…” And on set, how did he behave? “He asked a billion questions, but was attentive to respecting my choices, my direction. »
Solid popularity
“He was a model of seriousness and simplicity, he didn’t play around at all. It was easy to work with him,” comments André-Paul Ricci, press officer.
Michel Blanc was not a star. But his death sparked many emotional reactions this Friday, from all sides, in all strata of society. “We feel a sense of loss and a solid, anchored popularity,” estimates Pierre Schoeller. Michel was loved. » Through him, the French see the departure of a brilliant and honest artist, a man respected because of no vanity. And undoubtedly, for all those who became adults at the same time as the kids in Splendid, a part of their youth.
