He was compared to Marlon Brando and James Dean for his acclaimed portrayals of tough, alienated characters, most memorably in Godard’s “Breathless.”
Jean-Paul Belmondo, the rugged actor whose disdainful eyes, boxer’s nose, sensual lips and cynical outlook made him the idolized personification of youthful alienation in the French New Wave, most particularly in his classic performance as an existential killer in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 88. His lawyer, Michel Godest, confirmed the death in an interview on the French television news channel BFM. No cause was given. Like Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and James Dean — three American actors to whom he was frequently compared — Mr. Belmondo established his reputation playing tough, unsentimental, even antisocial characters who were cut adrift from bourgeois society. Later, as one of France’s leading stars, he took more crowd-pleasing roles, but without entirely surrendering his magnetic brashness. Like Bogart, Mr. Belmondo brought craggy features and a seething anger to the screen, a realistic counterpoint to more classically handsome romantic stars. Like Dean, he became one of the most widely imitated pop culture figures of his era. And like Mr. Brando, he was often dismissive of pretentiousness and self-importance among filmmakers. “No actor since James Dean has inspired quite such intense identification,” Eugene Archer wrote in The New York Times in 1965. “Dean evoked the rebellious adolescent impulse, as fierce as it was gratuitous, a violent outgrowth of the frustrations of the modern world.
