Jean-Paul Belmondo

Jean-Paul Belmondo's place in cinema was settled by Michel Poiccard in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless: an insolent, cunning, frighteningly amoral petty criminal. That same year he played the right hand of an underworld boss in Claude Sautet's The Big Risk, and the Criterion appreciation takes those two parts standing side by side as remarkable range, saying he fused a manliness with childlike innocence in the character. He worked with Jean-Pierre Melville on three films, Le Doulos and Leon Morin, Priest among them, playing a priest in the second. The work with Godard went on: he shared the lead with Anna Karina in A Woman Is a Woman and in Pierrot le Fou. Philippe de Broca's spy spoof That Man from Rio was his own favourite. He was known for refusing doubles and did scenes like hanging off skyscrapers himself. Claude Lelouch's Itinerary of a Spoiled Child won him the best actor Cesar in 1989.