PORTRAIT. Death of Michel Blanc: laughter and emotion on edge

Belong to a troop and stand out from it. Be identified with a cult character and free yourself from it. Start with talent in comedy and explore all other registers with the same talent. Overcome his shyness and become one of the most popular and beloved actors of the French.

Michel Blanc, who left us suddenly at the age of 72 after an anaphylactic shock, was all of this at the same time and the tributes that have abounded since yesterday, coming from his friends, his stage comrades, the directors and actors who worked with him, and all the French people he made laugh and moved reflect the special place he occupied in French cinema.

Born on April 16, 1952 in Courbevoie, in Hauts-de-Seine, Michel Blanc grew up in a modest family. His father, Marcel, was a mover then a logistics executive and his mother, Jeanine, a typist then an accountant.

An only son, Michel Blanc is even more pampered by his parents and grandparents since he was discovered to have a heart murmur at birth. “I was raised on cotton. I was constantly told that I was fragile, that doesn’t reassure,” the actor recalled in 2015 for Paris Match, adding: “I didn’t like this period. I wasn’t meant to be young. I was convinced that I couldn’t be happy until I was 30. That’s kind of what happened. »

The birth of the Splendid troupe

The passion for theater comes early, around 6-7 years old. Furious at only being an extra in a school end-of-year performance, he tells his parents that he wants to do theater. “They told me: ‘To succeed in this path, you need relationships and we don’t have any.’ I made up my mind, until the day I met, at the Pasteur high school in Neuilly, those who would become my accomplices in Le Splendid.”

When he met Thierry Lhermitte, Christian Clavier, Gérard Jugnot and Marie-Anne Chazel, it was the piano that occupied him until he was 20. “I worked six hours a day for a year to see if anything happened. When I had to give up, I experienced it as a romantic breakup,” he said.

So let’s head to the theater. The café-theatre more precisely, to which his classmates take him after he was eliminated in the first round of the drama competition at the rue Blanche school. The incredible adventure of the Splendid can begin, first on stage, then in the cinema.

Shy, puny, great hypochondriac – “I am the pioneer of hydroalcoholic gel! » –, young Michel quickly loses his hair and will rely more on self-deprecation and humor, sometimes caustic, than on his physique. “I have an advantage over late bald people, I have never associated baldness with age,” joked the man who has long felt bad about himself. “As I didn’t like myself, I wanted to play characters who weren’t me.”

After small roles in the cinema, he was revealed to the general public in 1978 with quite a character that would stick to his skin: Jean-Claude Dusse, in the comedy “Les Bronzés”, directed by Patrice Leconte and adapted from the play “Amours, coquillages et crustaceans” previously created and performed by the Splendid troupe. This character of a failed flirt, always convinced of being able to “finish” and whose cult lines have passed down to posterity, is found in “Les bronzés sont du ski (1979)” and establishes the notoriety of Michel Blanc among the general public.

But this role also confines him to other similar hypochondriacs and clumsy flirters. Which does not prevent the successes which follow one another for the successful comedies “Come to my place, I live with a friend” (1981), “My wife is called come back” (1982), “Circulez y’a nothing to see” and “Grandpa is resisting” (1983).

Evening wear: the turning point

The following year, he left Splendid and went behind the camera to direct the comedy “Marche à l’ombre” with Gérard Lanvin. A hit – 6.1 million spectators – which also underlines his talent as a screenwriter and dialogue writer which we will find later in “Gross Fatigue” (1994), a biting comedy about celebrity, or “Kiss whoever you want” (2002 ), successful adaptation of the novel by Joseph Connolly.

After the success of “Marche à l’ombre”, Michel Blanc took a radical turn and abandoned comedy to film the transgressive “Evening Tenue” by Bertrand Blier with Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou. A real risk-taking, but a real success at the end, “a total shift, a whirlwind…”. The Gai Pied magazine headlines “Touche pas à la femme Blanc” and Michel Blanc wins the male actor prize at Cannes.

Between comedies and dramas

Michel Blanc then seems to have found his way, exploring all registers and alternating popular comedies and dramatic films where the full range of his talent is displayed: a sensitivity, a melancholy, a spleen which makes the French laugh, smile and move each time .

This is how we see him playing on the one hand the disturbing “Monsieur Hire” (1989), according to Simenon, or a homosexual doctor at the beginning of AIDS in “Les Témoins” (2007) by André Téchiné ; and on the other side in several comedies including “I find you very handsome”, where he plays a widowed and embittered farmer in love. Michel Barnier made him a knight of the Order of Agricultural Merit in 2008 for this fine role.

“He is a lonely, wounded, disconcerted man,” said his friend, the writer Françoise Sagan, of Michel Blanc. “I am an anxious person who prefers action to depression”, specified the person concerned, as discreet in his private life as he was a perfectionist in his projects, in the theater – winner of the Molière adapter for “L’Amour is the child of a bastard” in 2004 – like in the cinema.

Finally, in 2012, he was crowned with a César for best supporting actor for Pierre Schoeller’s film “The Exercise of the State”. A second will follow, Birthday Caesar, in 2021 with all the friends of the Splendid. This gang of seven met for their 50th anniversary last April, brought together by Paris Match. In the photos, everyone was dressed the same except one, Michel Blanc, as a nod to his journey, choral and singular, between laughter and skin-deep emotion.