Making a Career Out of Mid-Life Crises : Movies: The much-in-demand French actor plays a painter inspired by a young model in Jacques Rivette’s four-hour ‘La Belle Noiseuse.’

For more than 35 years, Michel Piccoli has been one of France’s finest, most versatile actors in television and the theater, and has worked in film for virtually every major French director.

Sixty-five-year-old Piccoli, who started going bald at an early age, has changed very little over the decades and continues to play romantic leads without straining. Although he has always loved playing bizarre characters, he is perhaps most identified with his roles as sensitive, complex middle-aged men in mid-life crises, as in Claude Sautet’s “Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others.”

In a recent interview in a restaurant of the Santa Monica beachfront hotel where he was staying with his wife and two young children, Piccoli talked about his busy life.

His latest film, Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse” (translating roughly as “The Beautiful Troublemaker”), opens today at the Nuart.

A four-hour film of cumulative power, it begins with deceptive simplicity. A famous painter (Piccoli) lives in retirement with his wife (Jane Birkin) in a vast old chateau. He’s visited by his agent, who wants to get some work out of him and who has brought along a younger couple, another painter and his wife (Emmanuelle Beart, best known for her title role in “Manon of the Spring”). Her beauty inspires Piccoli to take up his brush for the first time in a decade, eager to complete a painting for which Birkin had served as the original model.

“Rivette and his two writers, Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, had written a 20-page novella inspired by a Balzac novella,” said Piccoli, adding that he never thought he’d find a place in the world of one of France’s most complex filmmakers. “They wrote 20 magnificent pages, they spoke of Balzac, about painting and the work of the painter.

“What is the relationship between the painter and the model? No one seems to know the answer. Most people think that it is a sexual relationship, but it is not that at all. The character I play is at the end of his life, he’s out of breath, on the edge of death. He’s trying to re-create his love for his wife through another woman, he tries to be reborn through another model.

“The film was written while we were shooting. Before we started we talked a lot, we discussed what the film was going to be. The writers would be there every morning, they would read the scenes with Rivette and asked us actors if they should change anything. It was improvisation but a very precise one. The film is open to many meanings--and that’s its best quality.”

Piccoli said that although many thought it would be “suicide” to take the four-hour “La Belle Noiseuse” to Cannes, it took the Prix du Festival earlier this year.

During his brief visit to Los Angeles, Piccoli filmed some back-projection sequences at Disney for “From Time to Time,” a time-travel short film produced by Renault in wrap-around Circle-Vision 360 for the EuroDisneyland near Paris.

The actor also happily reported that Jiri Weiss’ poignant “Martha and Me,” which was shown at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January, has now opened in France and now has distribution in Germany. (American distribution has yet to be set).

Made in Weiss’ native Czechoslovakia, it teams Piccoli with Marianne Sagebrecht in her first major serious role. Piccoli plays a successful Jewish physician who throws over his glamorous, adulterous wife for Sagebrecht’s plump German housekeeper, who initially refuses him in her astonishment. What begins as an offbeat romantic comedy darkens, however, as World War II draws near. Weiss based the film upon his uncle’s marriage.

“To work with Marianne, for us to play this strange couple, was for me something special,” he said. “She’s very easy to work with because she’s so generous, so inventive. She has an innocence in the good sense of the word. She doesn’t know what a good actress she is, and she’s not only interested in her actress’ ego.”

Last winter Piccoli completed Nico Pappatakis’ “Les Equilibristes” (“The Tightrope Walkers”) and went to the Venice Film Festival for its premiere. “It’s inspired by part of Jean Genet’s life,” said Piccoli. “It’s the story of a writer who is a genius and is in love with a young man who works in a circus as a groom but wants to be a tightrope walker. This writer wants to make him the greatest tightrope walker in the world.

“It’s ‘Pygmalion,’ a love story tres folle --very crazy!”

Since then he has taken a small role in Christian de Chalonge’s “The Children Thief.” “Marcello Mastroianni has the leading part,” said Piccoli. “He’s a man who cannot have children with his wife but so loves them he steals them. Marcello and I are so close, we made five or six films for Marco Ferreri. I’m happy to be working with him again--but I should have had his part!”

Currently, Piccoli is shooting a yet-to-be-titled film for director Pierre Granier-Deferre. “We will finish it after Venice,” he said. “The story is set in an English school, which is why we’re shooting in Belgium. I play a librarian, and I get involved in a complex triangle with a student--I had been her tutor--and her boyfriend. My co-stars are Claire Nebout and Melvil Popaud.”

Piccoli has made approximately 138 films--”I’d don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to know”--and planned to take the briefest of respites, wedging in a week’s vacation, before returning to France. “My wife and our children--one’s 5, the other 6--will take a trailer up to Northern California. I am very lucky: My wife is a very strong woman.”