Michel Blanc

Le Splendid began as a Paris cafe-theatre troupe, and Michel Blanc, born in Courbevoie in 1952, co-founded it with Thierry Lhermitte, Josiane Balasko, Christian Clavier, Marie-Anne Chazel and Gerard Jugnot. Their stage material became French Fried Vacation in 1978 and a sequel the following year, and Blanc's Jean-Claude Dusse, the holiday-camp bachelor who fails at absolutely everything and never stops trying, turned into national shorthand. He was still playing him in 2006, in the third film.

What he was good at was humiliation without self-pity. He specialised in losers and hypochondriacs and gave them a dryness that stopped the audience feeling superior to them, which is a much harder trick than it looks and the reason the character survived nearly thirty years of sequels.

The serious work arrived without much warning. Antoine in Menage in 1986, then the title role in Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire in 1989, a straight dramatic lead handed to a man his country had filed as a clown. The awards on his record include a Cesar for supporting actor and a Cannes prize for best actor. He wrote and directed as well, and this catalogue holds him as director on The Escort in 1999; he played a version of himself in Dead Tired in 1994.

Later credits are character work in mainstream comedy: Inspector Forget in Pret-a-Porter, the mayor in The Hundred-Foot Journey, R.A.I.D. Special Unit, Christmas with the Tuches. He died in 2024. Two 2025 films on this page, The Safe House and The Rookie Guide, arrived after that.