| François Périer François Périer's career spanned nearly 60 years; he starred in 108 films and roughly 80 stage plays... Advert: François Périer memorabilia @ ebay.fr (direct link to memorabilia) Orphee (1950). Anyone have any more biography details or photos of him they would like to share here? Please email anything here (ihuppert5@aol.com). Cocteau cast him as Heurtebise, the Angel of Death who escorts Orpheus (Jean Marais) into the underworld and Perier rose from a jobbing actor to the realms of immortality. Advert: François Périer memorabilia @ ebay.fr (direct link to memorabilia) Not that his career wasn't noteworthy without it - he worked for, among others, Marcel Carné, Christian Jacques, Julien Duvivier, René Clément and Jean-Pierre Melville as well as his baddie in Fellini´s Le notti di Cabiria - it's just his Heurtebise elevated him beyond a lifetime of watchable and decent roles in comedies, political thrillers and all that lay in-between. He died of a heart attack on a Friday, a summer's day in Paris in 2002. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's since the early 1990s. Buried in Passy Cemetery, Paris, France. Advert: François Périer memorabilia @ ebay.fr (direct link to memorabilia) Birth Name: François Married three times. Three children. My favourite role of his apart from Heurtebise is as Le Commissaire in Melville's Le Samouraï (1967). If you can see past Delon then his obstinate police inspector is extremely watchable. He's one of those actors whose career was so long you kind of think he was always in every French movie ever made. But of course there was a beginning to his career and an end - it's just that his likeable face makes it feel he's still popping up in movies like a perennial uncle. Orphee is a living testimony that he was once magnificiently young. Advert: François Périer memorabilia @ ebay.fr (direct link to memorabilia) |
