Daniel Auteuil
Daniel Auteuil is an actor, born 1950.
The role that made Daniel Auteuil was not a flattering one. Born in Algiers in 1950 and working in French film from the late 1970s, largely in comedy, he was cast in 1986 as Ugolin Soubeyran across Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring: a Provencal peasant whose cruelty comes from being too limited to see it as cruelty. He played it without a single bid for sympathy, and it brought him a Cesar for best actor and a BAFTA for best supporting actor.
Ten years later he shared the best actor prize at Cannes with Pascal Duquenne for The Eighth Day, and a second Cesar came for The Girl on the Bridge. What ties those very different films together is his refusal to explain his characters. In Cache he plays Georges Laurent as a man whose composure is the offence, a face working hard to keep something off it for two hours, and the performance is almost entirely in what he declines to show.
The range is wider than the arthouse reputation suggests. He does farce properly in The Closet, romance in A Heart in Winter, swashbuckling in On Guard, procedural in 36th Precinct and The Lookout, and comfortable late-career crowd-pleasers in The Valet, La Belle Epoque and Le Brio. He has directed as well as acted, and he is still going: Farewell, Mr. Haffmann in 2022 and A Private Life in 2025.
Movies (40)
- Rape of Love (1978)
- A Private Life (2025)
- For 200 Grand, You Get Nothing Now (1982)
- Manon of the Spring (1986)
- Caché (2005)
- Queen Margot (1994)
- Sade (2000)
- Crescendo (2026)
- Remi, Nobody's Boy (2018)
- Jean de Florette (1986)
- 36th Precinct (2004)
- La Belle Époque (2019)
- The Valet (2006)
- The Closet (2001)
- The New Toy (2022)
- One Hundred and One Nights (1995)
- In Her Name (2016)
- The Under-Gifted (1980)
- The Eighth Day (1996)
- A Heart in Winter (1992)
- Le Brio (2017)
- The Confessions (2016)
- The Well Digger's Daughter (2011)
- The Well Digger's Daughter (2011)
- The Last Deadly Mission (2008)
- Blood from a Stone (2012)
- The Lookout (2012)
- A French Woman (1995)
- Pereira Declares (1995)
- The Girl on the Bridge (1999)
TV (4)
Where to start with Daniel Auteuil
Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring are one film in two parts and should be watched together. Ugolin is the reason his career happened, and the second half is where the performance turns from grotesque to genuinely sad.
Once you have that, go straight to Caché. It is the best use anyone has made of his stillness, a domestic thriller where the tension is entirely a matter of what a comfortable man will not admit, and it rewards a second viewing more than most.
For the other half of him, The Closet is a properly funny farce and The Girl on the Bridge is romantic in a way that should not work at all. A Heart in Winter is the coldest and possibly the finest thing here. Save La Belle Époque for when you want the charming late-period version, and 36th Precinct for when you want him hard and unlikeable.