Michel Blanc, the beloved “concerned clown” of French cinema, has died

French actor, director and screenwriter Michel Blanc looks on during the presentation of the film ‘Monsieur Hire’ as part of the 42nd Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, May 21, 1989. French actor and director Michel Blanc, leading figure of the Splendid Theater Company, died on the night of October 3, 2024, aged 72. | Photo: AFP

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

Blanc died early Friday at the age of 72, his family said AFP.

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

Blanc is best remembered for his breakthrough role in “French fry vacation” (“Les Bronzes”), a 1978 comedy about vacationers trying to escape their everyday problems and looking for romance at a vacation resort in the Ivory Coast.

Blanc’s character, Jean-Claude Dusset, is an awkward bachelor and badass harmonica player with an orange karate belt who hopes to seduce women but fails.

“He was an amazing 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 mustache appeared in several other comedies, but he also feared that after Fried Vacation got two sequels, he would be portrayed as the lovable deadbeat forever.

“It was clear that the role of Jean-Claude Duce suited me,” he told Paris Match magazine this year. But he added: “Very quickly I became afraid that this was going to stick with me for the rest of my life.”

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

“He was the sick Frenchman who you just couldn’t hold down,” said Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes festival, adding that he hoped Blanc’s popular successes would not make the public forget his serious work, such as the acclaimed and haunting “Mr Heer(1989).

Blanc, who is sometimes called a “sad clown” in the 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 doesn’t worry? What is the human condition? It’s not knowing why we’re here and not knowing how we’re going to die,” he said.