The comic actor will be able to assume all the mistakes, bear all the ridicule of his contemporaries, he will always remain a form of non-negotiable greatness: that of offering a reflection of banality, of embracing the mediocrity that runs through everyone and, probably, unites us. In any case, this was the contribution of Michel Blanc, a popular actor, who gave substance to Mr. Everyman and knew how to humanize beyond all expectations this vague statistic that is the average Frenchman, making it funny, while implicitly transmitting a Note most painful: the failure of the galley slave, the anguish of the loser, a rather moving form of depression. Their small size, their baldness long offset by a mustache, their puppy-dog eyes, which could have passed for disadvantages, inscribed them in the legend of the ordinary, converted into a franchouillard archetype, with a touch of malice and a lot. of tenderness.
Coming from the café-theater school, trained in the ranks of the Splendid company, which dominated French laughter for decades, he gained notoriety thanks to the indescribable character of Jean-Claude Dusse in the series Tannedof Patrice Leconte, a scruffy man in a holiday club taking rake after rake. He was also that “poor man” to whom the corpulent Gérard Depardieu swore and whom he induced to dress up, in evening wear (1986), by Bertrand Blier, which began the actor’s dramatic career and earned him an acting award at the Cannes Film Festival. Michel Blanc has also directed, sporadically, half a dozen films, walk in the shadow (1984) to Look how we dance (2018), without giving up their gaming prerogatives. He died in his hospital bed in Paris, on the night of October 3-4, after a heart attack at the age of 72.
Michel Blanc was born on April 16, 1952 in Courbevoie (Seine), to a customs declarant father and a typist mother who formed a typical household of the emerging middle class. He grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Puteaux, between his parents’ two-room kitchen, soon displaced to Colombes by the large concrete work of La Défense, and his grandparents’ watchmaking workshop: a changing landscape. path of urbanization that still leads to vacant land and the beginnings of rurality. An only child, the boy suffered from a heart murmur, and from this physical vulnerability certain traits of his comic character emerged, often bilious, fearful or nosophobic.
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