French Filmmaker and Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant Dies at 91

Actors Jean-Louis Trintignant (L) and Isabelle Huppert pose during a photo call for Love at the 65th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, on May 20, 2012. (Joel Ryan/AP Photo)

PARIS—French filmmaker, actor, and amateur race car driver Jean-Louis Trintignant has died. He was 91.

Trintignant died in his home in southern France, according to Bertrand Cortellini, who operated a vineyard with the actor and visited him Thursday before his death. He did not divulge details. French news reports said Trintignant had prostate cancer.

In a career that started when he was 19, Trintignant appeared in more than 100 films. He was one of France’s premier actors in the post-war era—and one of the last remaining performers of his generation.

Tributes poured in after his death was announced Friday. France’s national Cinematheque museum called him “one of the greatest actors in the history of French cinema.”

Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant (R) speaks as director Michael Haneke looks on after he is presented with the Palme d'Or award for Love during the awards ceremony at the 65th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, on May 27, 2012. (Lionel Cironneau/AP Photo)

Born Dec. 11, 1930, in Piolenc in southern France, near where he died, Trintignant started out acting in the theater but gained broader fame in cinema.

He described turning to acting to overcome intense shyness. An actor “is to be a blank page, starting from nothing, from silence. From there, you don’t need to make a lot of noise to be listened to,” he was quoted as saying in Le Monde.

He starred in Italian films and several films by legendary French director Claude Lelouch, most famously “A Man and a Woman” in 1966, which won the Oscar for best foreign film.

Trintignant stopped performing for nearly a decade after the loss of his daughter Marie, also an actor, in 2003. Her boyfriend, popular French singer Bertrand Cantat, beat her to death during a dispute in a hotel room in Lithuania, where she was making a film.

Trintignant continued acting on stage and on screen into his 80s, and earned new international attention in Michael Haneke’s 2013 Oscar-winning drama “Amour,” a raw depiction of an aging couple and the ravages of Alzheimer’s on their love.

In his final role on film, Trintignant reunited with Lelouch and Aimee in “The Best Years of a Life,” in 2019.

Among survivors are his wife Mariane Hoepfner, a former race car driver, and his son Vincent Trintignant and grandson Jules Benchetrit, also actors.