Biography: life and films
Raymond Pellegrin was born in Nice, in the south of France, on 1st
January 1925. His real name is Raymond Pellegrini. Having
completed his drama course, he began a busy stage career in the
mid-1940s, appearing in productions of Marcel Pagnol's
Topaze and Léopold
Marchand's
Balthazar.
Concurrently, he began appearing in films, his first notable roles
being in Jacques de Baroncelli's
Marie
la Misère (1945) and Marcel Pagnol's
Naïs (1945). Raymond
Pellegrin's skill as an actor endeared him to some distinguished
filmmakers, including André Cayatte (
Nous sommes tous des assassins,
1952), Henri Verneuil (
Le Fruit défendu, 1952),
Marcel Pagnol (
Manon des sources, 1953), Henri
Decoin (
Les Intrigantes, 1954)
and Robert Siodmak (
Le Grand jeu,
1954). Sacha Guitry chose him to play the older Bonaparte in his
lavish historical epic
Napoléon (1955).
The American director Nicolas Ray gave him his first English-speaking
role in
Bitter Victory
(1957), although Pellegrin's repeated attempts to break into Hollywood
ultimately came to nothing.
Pellegrin's most famous screen credit is for a series of films in which
he did not even appear on screen. With his deep, seductive voice,
who better to dub Jean Marais as the archest of arch-criminals, in
André Hunebelle's popular
Fantômas
(1964) and its two sequels? By this stage in his career,
Pellegrin was struggling to find roles worthy of his talents, although
Jean-Pierre Melville gave him a memorable part in
Le Deuxième souffle
(1966). For the next decade, he would be relegated to low budget
productions, including several misfires in Italy. As his career
declined in the 70s and 80s, he occasionally found work with reputable
filmmakers, including Yves Boisset (
Le
Saut de l'ange, 1971) and Claude Lelouch (
Les Uns et les autres,
1981).
From the mid-1980s, television gave Pellegrin's career a new lease of
life, with the actor frequently appearing in TV movies and series made
in France and Italy - these included
Le
Triplé gagnant, which gave him one of his best-known
roles as Commissaire Rocca. His final appearance was in the
French television film
Notes sur le
rire (2002), based on a story by Marcel Pagnol, the man who
helped to launch his career six decades previously. In a career
that spanned almost sixty years, Raymond Pellegrin took on more than
130 screen roles. He died in Garons, France, on 14th October
2007, aged 82.
© James Travers 2013
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