His death last Thursday came as a shock to many French people. The funeral of actor Michel Blanc, known in particular for his role as Jean-Claude Dusse in the saga “Les Bronzés”, will take place on Thursday October 10 at 4 p.m. at the Saint-Eustache Church in Paris (1st arrondissement), according to our information confirming that of TF1. He died following allergic shock during a medical examination after taking medication.
When his death was announced, many personalities from the world of culture paid tribute to him. In a press release for example, the entire Splendid troupe – of which he was a member alongside Josiane Balasko, Marie-Anne Chazel, Christian Clavier, Gérard Jugnot, Thierry Lhermitte and Bruno Moynot – expressed their “immense pain “. “He made us cry with laughter and moved us to tears. Monument of French cinema, Michel Blanc is gone,” reacted the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron on X (ex-Twitter).
Many roles
Coming from a modest family, Michel Blanc has long embodied in the cinema the archetype of the loser, bald, skinny and mustachioed as exasperating as he is endearing, notably in “Marche à l’ombre” (1984), which he directed. “At the time, we wrote characters who were quite close to us. Jean-Claude Dusse was clearly for me,” he told Paris Match in the spring.
Anxious to break this image, he slipped away first from the Splendid to take other paths, more serious and tortuous. “It wasn’t against my friends. I was wondering: do I exist or am I 1/7th of Splendid? », he justified himself. He then dared to play dramatic roles like that of the transvestite Antoine in “Tenue de soir” (1986) by Bertrand Blier or the disturbing “Monsieur Hire” (1989) by Patrice Leconte, based on a book by Georges Simenon, exploring thus its deep nature.
Later, he would play a cold and methodical ministerial chief of staff in “L’Exercice de l’Etat”, which earned him a César in 2012. “It’s a type of role that I dreamed of but I wasn’t sure that you accept me in this role, that the public accepts me in these roles,” he declared, moved, when receiving his prize. For his latest role, Michel Blanc once again opted for a serious register: “La Cache”, an adaptation of Christophe Boltanski’s novel about the trauma of a Jewish family forced into hiding to escape the Nazis, is due out in 2025.