Cracked Actor:Jean-Louis Trintignant

In the hands of the late Jean-Louis Trintignant, the seemingly unexceptional bourgeois is always more than meets the eye. A postwar star of primarily French and Italian films who racked up over 100 credits before his death this year at 91, the industrious actor was displacement personified, a plausible sicko who blended into the crowd. He played his fair share of hitmen and actioneers; his cold-blooded gaze and natural reticence gave him the look of an expert killer, be it righteous (a mute gunslinger in Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 wintertime Western, The Great Silence) or unhinged (a serial murderer on the run in Jacques Deray’s Flic Story, 1975). He was an erotic-thriller regular, at home in the pulpiest of policiers and the murkiest of ménage à trois. His look—attractive in a bureaucratic way—and his air of propriety complicated his characters’ often fraught desires, which deepened in flavor, in texture, behind the curtain of his reserve.