Jean-Paul Belmondo was not only a great actor. He could have been a boxer, a member of GIGN, but he had chosen the cinema. With him, the wicked had better behave. An accomplished athlete until his last films, L’As des as took all the risks: he was known to assure himself the perilous acts of the characters he played in his films. Because this daredevil, who disappeared Monday, September 6, 2021 at the age of 88, did not like to cheat.
Friend of several professional stuntmen, including Rémy Julienne, he has hardly ever been dubbed and has accomplished most of his exploits himself from The man from Rio (1964) and until his stroke in 2001 at the age of 68, sometimes with so little equipment that it was almost unconscious.
“A lot of people have seen me do stunts and they know I do them myself, I don’t get overtaken”, he admitted. “When I was very young, I hesitated between a sporting career or an actor and with this kind of cinema I do both, so I am a fulfilled man”, he added.
That it passes between two buildings on a cable in The man from Rio, that it evolves on the roof of a metro and flattens out just before passing through the tunnel in Fear over the city, that he finds himself suspended from a helicopter in his underwear and multiplies the aerial acrobatics in The Guignolo, or climb a jetty in a canoe launched at 100 km / hour in Happy Easter, his antics and balancing acts have delighted generations of spectators.
The waterfalls, Jean-Paul Belmondo “never had enough“, told the Parisian in 2017 the stuntman Rémy Julienne, who trained him for all his films. “He was formidably athletic, of course, had no vertigo, but above all he had a phenomenal mind.. “”With him, it was always faster, always stronger, always further (…) he had absolute confidence, which is extremely rare, including from professional stuntmen. (…) It was all the same reckless, what we were doing! When I think about it today, my hairs stand on end… “