Jean-Louis Barrault; French Classic Actor

Jean-Louis Barrault, considered by many to be France’s greatest classic actor, died Saturday.

The actor-director, whose versatility and dramatic gifts delighted international audiences for more than 50 years, was 83 when he died at his home in western Paris.

Reuters news agency said he died of heart failure.

A veteran of both classic and contemporary drama, Barrault was equally at ease with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” or a bold stage adaptation of Rabelais’ Renaissance masterpiece, “Gargantua and Pantagruel.”

Soon after his death, tributes began pouring in from actors and public figures; French television stations changed their programs to run his films.

Culture Minister Jacques Toubon said Barrault “held high the flag of theater and the flag of France in his triumphant tours abroad” and he praised the actor’s “unique mixture of subtlety and power, of intelligence and energy.”

As an actor, he proved an expert mime and an accomplished vocal melodramatist. That diversity extended to what some felt was the ridiculous when he staged what he called a “dramatic game,” a 1970 rock musical version of the barnyard characters that make up the oeuvre of Rabelais. He named the extravaganza for the 16th-Century French satirist whose name has become synonymous with coarse humor.

Critics in New York and Los Angeles were exuberant; audiences who spoke no French were perplexed.

One of his other audacious moves was the staging of “The Screens” by Jean Genet, a confessed thief who spent years in prison.

Barrault also starred in numerous films, including his best known part as Baptiste in Marcel Carne’s 1945 classic, ‘The Children of Paradise.”

He also had featured roles in “The Longest Day” in 1961 and “La Nuit de Varennes” in 1981.

Born in Le Vesinet outside Paris, Barrault decided on a theatrical career when he was only 6. He studied at drama school and began as a mime.

Barrault and actress Madeleine Renaud were married in 1940, and they formed one of France’s most enduring and prominent stage couples, likened to the American-British husband-and-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

In 1947 they founded the popular Theatre de Marigny on the Champs Elysees, which for 10 years played to audiences of artists and intellectuals, celebrities and socialites and working-class men and women.

After a brilliant decade at Marigny, the Renaud-Barrault troupe moved into the state-subsidized Odeon theater where they staged the works of such contemporary playwrights as Henri de Montherlant, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.

After an evening of French readings at UCLA in 1969, a Los Angeles Times drama critic likened Barrault and Renaud on stage to a melding of metals:

“He clenches a fist at life; she extends a hand. He would change the world; she would make you comfortable in it. He is brass, she is silver.”

Barrault brought to his personal affairs a passionate force for human rights and tolerance. During the student-worker rebellion in May, 1968, Barrault sided with rioting students, whom he let into the Odeon.

He was fired as director of France’s International Theatre des Nations Festival after the riots but agreed to return at government invitation three years later.

As a director, Barrault experimented with theater in the round, staging Rabelais in an old dance hall converted to house wrestling matches.

Since 1981, he and Renaud had run the Theatre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysees, where they put on the best plays written by contemporary writers.

As he aged, his productions grew more temperate.

“Right now,” he told The Times in one of his last U.S. tours, “we are performing works that are lighter and aimed at enjoyment as a reaction against the daily cataclysms that existence proposes. It is in pleasure taken that mankind finds its harmony.”

Renaud is believed to be his only survivor.