2020.09.23 13:43World eye

俳優マイケル・ロンズデールさん死去 「007」の悪役など

【パリAFP=時事】英国系フランス人俳優のマイケル・ロンズデールさんが21日、死去した。89歳だった。代理人がAFPに明らかにした。ロンズデールさんは、「007」シリーズの作品で演じた悪役などで世界的に知られていた。(写真は俳優マイケル・ロンズデールさん。仏パリの映画祭で)
 代理人によると、1931年5月24日、英軍人の父とフランス人の母の元にパリで生まれたロンズデールさんは、同市の自宅で亡くなったという。
 バイリンガルだったロンズデールさんの俳優人生は60年にわたり、アートシアター系の実験映画から大型予算を投じた大衆作品まで、200以上の役を自在に演じ分けた。
 代表作は2010年の『神々と男たち』で、トラピスト修道院の修道士役を演じた。
 ただロンズデールさんの出演作で最も有名なのは、ジェームズ・ボンド役のロジャー・ムーアさんと共演した1979年の『007/ムーンレイカー』。サディスティックな実業家ヒューゴ・ドラックス役で、世界中の人々の記憶に残っている。【翻訳編集AFPBBNews】
〔AFP=時事〕(2020/09/23-13:43)
2020.09.23 13:43World eye

British-French actor and 'Bond' villain Michael Lonsdale dies


Michael Lonsdale, the British-French actor with a far-ranging film and theatre career but most widely recognised as the villain opposite James Bond in Moonraker, died on Monday aged 89, his agent told AFP.
Lonsdale, who was bilingual, chalked up more than 200 roles over a six-decade career, equally at ease in experimental arthouse productions as in big-budget crowd-pleasers.
With his silky yet imposing voice and a distinctive goatee, Lonsdale often served up memorable performances that stuck with viewers even when only in minor roles.
His agent, Olivier Loiseau, said he had died at his home in Paris, the city where he was born on May 24, 1931, to an English military officer and a French mother.
Arguably the highlight of his career came when he played a Trappist monk in Of Gods and Men in 2010.
Based on true events, the film tells the story of seven French monks who were murdered after being kidnapped from their monastery in Algeria in 1996 during the country's civil war.
For the role Lonsdale won his first and only Cesar award -- France's version of the Oscars -- for best supporting actor in 2011.
Yet for millions of people he was the sadistic industrialist Hugo Drax in the 1979 Bond film Moonraker starring Roger Moore, with a plot to destroy Earth's population with nerve gas while he escaped into space.
- Struggle with shyness -
Lonsdale was raised in London and later in Morocco during World War II, when in 1942 American soldiers introduced him to films by John Ford, George Cukor and Howard Hawks. He went to the cinema from an early age, and decided to become an actor.
He returned to Paris in 1947, where he discovered theatre and took lessons in dramatic art, later telling AFP of his struggles to overcome his shyness.
He made his theatre debut in 1955, and hit the big screen a year later. His talent for improvisation, his physical presence and mellifluous voice made him in demand from the early 1960s.
He performed in plays by top playwrights of the era including Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras.
His breakthrough came when French film director and New Wave innovator Francois Truffaut hired him for The Bride Wore Black and Stolen Kisses, both in 1968.
From then on he veered between arthouse and mainstream cinema, appearing among others in The Day of the Jackal (1973), Duras's India Song (1975), The Remains of the Day (1993) and as a grizzled associate of Robert De Niro's mercenary in Ronin (1998).
A practicing Catholic, Lonsdale also took on several clerical roles -- as a priest in Orson Welles's The Trial in 1962, as a cardinal in Joseph Losey's Galileo in 1975, and as the abbot in Middle Ages thriller The Name of the Rose in 1986.
But he was not above lighter fare: In Luis Bunuel's 1974 surrealist comedy The Phantom of Liberty, Lonsdale, his buttocks in the air, took part in a sado-masochistic session.

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