Biography: life and films
Bruno Cremer was born on 6th October 1929, at Saint-Mandé,
Val-de-Marne, France. At the age of 12, he had made up his mind
to become an actor and as soon as he could he enrolled at Paris's elite
drama school, le Conservatoire. Here, he rubbed shoulders with
such promising young talent as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Rochefort.
Cremer made his stage debut in 1953 at the Théâtre de
l'Ouvre in Jules Supervielle's
Robinson.
For much of the following decade, he would devote himself to his
theatre work, appearing in such diverse plays as Oscar Wilde's
An Ideal Husband, William
Shakespeare's
Pericles and
Jean Anouilh's
Becket ou l'Honneur
de Dieu, earning himself a reputation as one of France's most
promising young actors.
Cremer's film career began in earnest when Pierre Schoendoerffer gave
him his first leading role in
La
317e Section (1965). He had already appeared in a handful
of films in small roles but this is where his screen career took
off. Other film directors were not slow to see Cremer's talent
for playing complex and ambiguous characters with depth, introspection
and authenticity. He would work with some of the finest
filmmakers in the industry, including: Costa-Gavras (
Section spéciale, 1975),
Claude Lelouch (
Le Bon et les méchants,
1976), Bertrand Blier (
Tenue de soirée, 1986)
and François Ozon (
Sous le sable, 2000).
In the 1990s, Cremer found his largest audience as Inspector Maigret in a French television
series that ran for 54 episodes, from 1991 to 2005.
In 2003, Bruno Cremer published his autobiography,
Un certain jeune homme.
After suffering from cancer for several years, Cremer died on
7th August 2010 in a Paris hospital.
He is survived by his wife Chantal (whom he married in 1984), his two
daughters and his son Stéphane (a successful writer). For
many, he will be remembered as the definitive screen incarnation of Simenon's
pipe-smoking sleuth Maigret.
© James Travers 2010
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