Michel Blanc, French actor and director whose international breakthroughs included Monsieur Hire

‘Whenever I see Michel Blanc in a movie, I rejoice that he exists,’ wrote Roger Ebert in his review of Grosse fatigue

Michel Blanc, who has died aged 72, was a jovial linchpin of French stage and screen who won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival for work both in front of and behind the camera.
Blanc shared Best Actor laurels for his hilarious turn as a mild-mannered husband nudged towards criminality and transvestism by a hulking Gérard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier’s brusque comedy Tenue de soirée (“Evening Dress”, 1986). 
It was a banner year for short, balding performers proposing alternative models of masculinity: Blanc’s fellow honoree was Bob Hoskins, playing the lovelorn gangland chauffeur in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.
Later, Blanc and Blier collected the Best Screenplay gong for the in-jokey Grosse fatigue (“Dead Tired”, 1994), which saw Blanc both directing and playing a version of himself, a successful actor called Michel Blanc whose life unravels upon learning that a doppelganger has been abusing his celebrity perks. 
“Whenever I see Michel Blanc in a movie,” Roger Ebert opened his review, “I rejoice that he exists. He seems such an unlikely candidate for movie stardom.”
If Blanc never broke through internationally as Depardieu did, his films sporadically crossed the Channel to general acclaim, most memorably Monsieur Hire (1989), Patrice Leconte’s adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel. Here, Blanc excelled in a dramatic role as a lonely oddball accused of murder; Ebert noted that the character “seems to have been sprouted in a basement”.
In fact, Michel Jean François Blanc was born in Courbevoie in the Hauts-de-Seine region of France on April 16 1952, the only child of removals man Marcel Blanc and his typist wife Jeanine, née Billon. His was, however, a sheltered childhood, a consequence of being diagnosed with a heart murmur: “I was constantly told that I was fragile, which is not reassuring.”
Blanc studied at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he and his friends “liked to make fun of the teachers, especially the one who had stuck us in the front row and who, as a result, couldn’t see our faces anymore, since his desk was on the stage. So we did stupid things to make the class laugh.”
Blanc made his screen debut in the fantasy Les filles de Malemort (1974), and his distinctive looks soon attracted notable directors: he was Louis XV’s valet in Bertrand Tavernier’s Que la fête commence (“Let Joy Reign Supreme”, 1975) and one of the neighbours in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976). Yet his biggest success followed when, with his old school pals, he formed the theatrical collective Splendid.
The group, which included Josiane Balasko and Gérard Jugnot, exploded on to the 1970s Parisian café-theatre scene, eventually taking up permanent residence at Le Splendid on the Rue du Faubourg. Their first film, Les Bronzés (1978), set around a Club Med resort on the Ivory Coast, became a major local hit, fixing Blanc in the French imagination as the fumbling bachelor Jean-Claude Dusse (“I was afraid I would be associated with him for the rest of my life”).
Sequels followed in 1979 and 2006, but Blanc resisted typecasting. In the 1990s he reunited with Blier for Merci la vie (1991), played Alonso in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), and the ineffectual Inspector Forget in Robert Altman’s fashion-world flop Prêt-à-Porter (1994).
In the new century, he worked with André Téchiné on The Witnesses (2008) and The Girl on the Train (2009), lent César-winning support as a ministerial aide in the procedural L’Exercice de l’État (2011), and was a sly mayor moderating the gastronomic turf war between Michelin-starred Helen Mirren and Indian arrivistes in Lasse Hallström’s The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014).
The Splendid troupers reunited to receive an honorary César in 2021, after which Blanc returned to comedy, playing a bluff sixty-something belatedly registering for school in Les petites victoires (2023). His final screen appearance will be as the grandfather in an adaptation of Christophe Boltanski’s novel La cache.
After striking box-office gold with his directorial debut, the buddy comedy Marche à l’ombre (1984), Blanc occasionally returned behind the camera: he cast Daniel Auteuil as a befuddled gigolo in the London-set The Escort (1999), and drew on the writings of the British novelist Joseph Connolly for Embrassez qui vous voudrez (“Summer Things”, 2002) and Voyez comme on danse (“Kiss & Tell”, 2018).
“I’m not a sad clown,” Blanc once joked, “I’m a worried clown.” 
He is survived by his partner, the fashion designer Ramatoulaye Diop.
Michel Blanc, born April 16 1952, died October 4 2024