Offscreen Notes
Jean-Louis Trintignant (1930-June 17, 2022)
Cinema lost one of its most versatile actors today, the great French performer Jean-Louis Trintignant. Trintignant could be smooth, sexy, funny, cool, and charming. He played in arthouse and genre films and approached both with the same dedication and commitment. He starred in two of my drop dead favorite films of all-time. Films that I never tire of watching. Sergio Corbucci’s nihilistic spaghetti western The Great Silence, where he gave his own stamp to a particular type of ‘silent’ type with no name. A film that influenced a whole generation of 1970s American filmmakers, Il Conformista, where he played a sexually confused petite bourgeois who climbs the Fascist corporate ladder by staging a Shakespearean assassination of an anti-Fascist intellectual. And many other (mainly) French and Italian films with some of the greatest directors of his time.
