French cinema’s beloved ‘worried clown’ Michel Blanc dies

French actor, director and screenwriter Michel Blanc looks on during the presentation of the film “Monsieur Hire” as part of the 42th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 21, 1989. French actor and director Michel Blanc, a leading figure of the Splendid theatre company, died on October 3, 2024 night at the age of 72.
| Photo Credit: AFP

France on Friday (October 4, 2024) mourned actor Michel Blanc, beloved by generations for bringing a comic quality to even his saddest characters including losers and hypochondriacs.

Blanc died early Friday, aged 72, his family told AFP.

“He made us cry with laughter, and moved us to tears,” President Emmanuel Macron said of Blanc, calling him “a monument of French cinema”.

Blanc is most remembered for his breakthrough role in “French Fried Vacation” (“Les Bronzes”), a 1978 comedy about holidaymakers trying to escape their everyday problems and looking for romance at a holiday resort in Ivory Coast.

Blanc’s character, Jean-Claude Dusse, is an awkward bachelor and bad harmonica player with an orange belt in karate who hopes to seduce women but can’t pull it off.

“He was a fabulous actor who made us laugh,” Prime Minister Michel Barnier said, adding that news of Blanc’s death had made him “very emotional and very sad”.

Blanc’s trademark bald head and moustache appeared in several other comedies, but he also feared, after French Fried Vacation got two sequels, that he would be typecast as the lovable deadbeat forever.

“It was clear that the Jean-Claude Dusse role suited me,” he told Paris Match magazine this year. But, he added, “I got scared very fast that it would stick to me my whole life.”

Blanc branched out into serious film roles, theatre, screen-writing and directing, and became one of only a few people to win both an acting award and a screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival.

“He was the sickly French guy that you just can’t keep down,” said Gilles Jacob, the Cannes Festival’s former president, adding he hoped that Blanc’s popular successes would not make the public forget his serious work, such as the acclaimed and haunting “Monsieur Hire” (1989).

Blanc, who was sometimes called a “sad clown” in media, said the description missed the mark.

“I’m not a sad clown at all, I’m a worried clown” he told French culture magazine Telerama.

“And who isn’t worried? What is the human condition? It is not knowing why we are here, and not knowing how we will die,” he said.