Yves Montand

Music hall carried Yves Montand into cinema, and Jean-Pierre Melville, in the book-length interview published in 1971, treats precisely that as the thing separating him from Alain Delon. Montand plays Jansen, the alcoholic former policeman, in Le Cercle Rouge, and Melville calls him a perfectionist like himself, an actor who arrives on set in the morning with the whole thing worked out in his head, and says he had hoped to make more films with him. For Clouzot he was Mario in The Wages of Fear, driving one of the trucks loaded with nitroglycerine. In Costa-Gavras' Z he took the deputy modelled on Gregoris Lambrakis, killed in Thessaloniki, a man who stands against the obstacles the authorities place in front of a rally; Armond White calls that deputy a dignified, womanising politician. In Jean de Florette he was the greedy uncle who works with Ugolin to undermine the city man Jean and his enthusiasm for farming.