Gérard Blain

Gérard Blain (23 October 1930 – 17 December 2000) was a French actor and film director. He is perhaps best known for his roles in Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins (both 1959), Howard Hawks' Hatari! and Wim Wenders' The American Friend. (1977)

Biography Blain had a difficult childhood and adolescence after his father abandoned his family. He left school at aged 13 and became a street urchin. He had his first sexual experiences with older men and women while still a young teenager, a period later echoed in his semi-autobiographical film A Child in the Crowd (Un enfant dans la foule, 1976). Wishing to become an actor, Blain starting working as a film extra in 1943.

Blain had his breakthrough role in the crime drama Deadlier Than the Male (Voici le temps des assassins, 1956), opposite Jean Gabin: French media hailed him at the time as "the French James Dean". He starred in François Truffaut's short film Les Mistons (1957), Claude Chabrol's first two feature films Le Beau Serge (1958) and Les Cousins (1959), and appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's short film Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1960). This led him to be associated to the French New Wave, The French-Italian co-production system of the time also led him to star in Italian films, including Mauro Bolognini's Young Husbands (1958) and Carlo Lizzani's The Hunchback of Rome (1960) and Gold of Rome (1961).

His first film as a director, The Friends, won the Golden Leopard at the 1971 Locarno International Film Festival. Blain's directing choices were ascetic and rigorous and closely emulated Robert Bresson's style: he mostly employed non-professional actors, one major exception being his film Second Wind (1978) which starred Robert Stack. An outspoken critic of mainstream filmmaking and reportedly a difficult man to work with, Blain had an outsider status within the French film industry; although they were well-received by critics, his films as a director had little commercial success. While focusing on his directing work he kept appearing occasionally as an actor, notably in Wim Wenders' The American Friend (1977).

Blain married three times, including briefly to Bernadette Lafont. One of his sons, Paul Blain, also had an acting career.

Filmography Actor

Director