
Philippe Noiret
Born October 1, 1930 · Lille, Nord, France
Philippe Noiret (1 October 1930 – 23 November 2006) was a French film actor. Noiret was born in Lille, France, the son of Lucy (Heirman) and Pierre Noiret, a clothing company representative. He was an indifferent student and attended several prestigious Paris schools, including the Lycée Janson de Sailly. He failed several times to pass his baccalauréat exams, so he decided to study theater. He trained at the Centre Dramatique de l'Ouest and toured with the Théâtre National Populaire for seven years, where he met Monique Chaumette, whom he married in 1962. During that time he developed a career as a nightclub comedian in a duo act with Jean-Pierre Darras, in which he played Louis XIV in an extravagant wig opposite Darras as the dramatist Jean Racine. In these roles they satirized the politics of Charles de Gaulle, Michel Debré and André Malraux. Noiret's screen debut (1949) was an uncredited role in Gigi. In 1955 he appeared in La Pointe Courte directed by Agnès Varda. She said later, "I discovered in him a breadth of talent rare in a young actor." Sporting a pudding-basin haircut, Noiret played a lovelorn youth in the southern fishing port of Sète. He later admitted: "I was scared stiff, and fumbled my way through the part—I am totally absent in the film." He was not cast again until 1960 in Zazie dans le Métro. After playing second leads in Georges Franju's Thérèse Desqueyroux in 1962, and in Le Capitaine Fracasse, from Théophile Gautier's romantic adventure, he became a regular on the French screen, without being cast in major roles until A Matter of Resistance directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau in 1966. He became a star in France with Yves Robert's Alexandre le Bienheureux. "When I began to have success in the movies," Noiret told film critic Joe Leydon at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989, "it was a big surprise for me. For actors of my generation—all the men of 50 or 60 now in French movies—all of us were thinking of being stage actors. Even people like Jean-Paul Belmondo, all of us, we never thought we'd become movie stars. So, at the beginning, I was just doing it for the money, and because they asked me to do it. But after two or three years of working on movies, I started to enjoy it, and to be very interested in it. And I'm still very interested in it, because I've never really understood how it works. I mean, what is acting for the movies? I've never really understood." Noiret was cast primarily as the Everyman character, although he did not hesitate to accept controversial roles, such as in La Grande Bouffe, a film about suicide by overeating, which caused a scandal at Cannes in 1973, and in 1991 André Téchiné cast Noiret in J'embrasse pas (I Don't Kiss), as a melancholy old homosexual obsessed with young male flesh. And in 1987, in The Gold Rimmed Glasses based on Giorgio Bassani's novel about the cramped social life of post-war Ferrara in Italy, he played an elderly and respectable doctor who is gradually suspected of being a covert homosexual with a passion for a beautiful young man (Rupert Everett). Noiret won his first César Award for his role in Vieux Fusil in 1976. His second César came in 1990 for his role in Life and Nothing But. ... Source: Article "Philippe Noiret" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Notable Appearances
Movies
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The Old Gun

Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

Woman Times Seven

The Return of the Musketeers

The Family

Zazie dans le Métro

Dead Tired

Let's Hope It's a Girl

Playing with Fire

My Friends Act II

The Assassination Bureau

Murphy's War

The Man Who Planted Trees

D'Artagnan's Daughter

The Down-in-the-Hole Gang

All the Gold in the World

Coup de Torchon

The Desert of the Tartars

My New Partner

A Woman at Her Window

Marcello, una vita dolce

Birgit Haas Must Be Killed

The Judge and the Assassin

Let Joy Reign Supreme

The Serpent

The Assassination

Edy

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

Don't Touch the White Woman!

A Matter of Resistance

Jupiter's Thigh

The Incredible Mr. Piccoli

The Watchmaker of St. Paul

Famous Love Affairs

Les Rois du gag

La Pointe Courte

Give Her the Moon

A Friend of Vincent

Uranus

A Day in the Life of French Cinema

Fort Saganne

My New Partner II

A Common Sense of Modesty

Twist Again in Moscow

Father and Sons

We Are All in Temporary Liberty

Cyrano and d'Artagnan

The Purple Taxi

On Guard

The Gold Rimmed Glasses

A Week's Vacation

Captain Fracasse

The African

Lady L

Chouans !

Life and Nothing But

The North Star

Crime Does Not Pay

Lest We Forget

A Cloud in the Teeth

A Time for Loving

Two Pieces of Bread

Jean Rochefort, l'irrésistible

Comiques de toujours (Vol. 1 à 4)

Marianna Ucrìa

My New Partner III

The Buddies

The Lovers of the France

The Old Maid

Next Summer

Macbeth

Mr. Freedom

Gigi

Le Roi de Paris

Death, Where Is Your Victory?

Tango

I Don't Kiss

Heads or Tails

Especially on Sunday

The Witness

Forgery and the Use of Forgeries

Rossini! Rossini!

The Grand Dukes

Ballad for a Hoodlum

Justine

Souvenirs souvenirs

Father's Trip

Marco Ferreri: The Director Who Came from the Future

Les Milles

Clémentine chérie

The Palermo Connection

Widow's Walk

Rendezvous

The Dog, the General, and the Birds

Ravishing

Very Happy Alexander

Three Brothers

The Tender Age

The Most Gentle Confessions

Le Veilleur de nuit

La Porteuse de pain

Olivia

Lulu Kreutz's Picnic

The Secret

Monsieur

The Masseuses

La Barricade du Point-du-Jour

Five Leaf Clover

Ghost with Driver

The Two of Us

Pierre and Marie

Young Toscanini

Therese

Max & Jeremie

Summer Frenzy

Le Grand Carnaval

The Sultans

De fil en aiguille

The Fourth Power

Too Loud A Solitude

Balthus through the Looking-Glass

Rochefort, Marielle, Noiret: Les copains d'abord

Before Midnight

Fish Soup

Soleil

The Chops

Le Mal court

La Mandarine

Masks

3 Friends

Matrimonial Agency

The Secret Wife

Comme un poisson dans l'eau

Aurora

Clerambard

A Bear and a Mouse in Paradise

The Troubles We've Seen

Looking for Paradise

Monsieur Albert

Cyrano de Bergerac

Les Œuvres de Frédéric Back

L'école est finie

Step by Step

The Sparrow's Fluttering

Hitler, la folie d'un homme
























