At the heart of Jacques Demy’s delirious, gaily coloured musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967) is the cherubic sailor and artist Maxence, who has painted his “feminine ideal” and is now searching for the flesh and blood equivalent, hardly suspecting that she lives nearby in the form of Catherine Deneuve. With his mop of bright vanilla hair and his white bachi hat with its cherry-like pom-pom, Maxence personifies the film’s wistful, ingenuous spirit. He was played by Jacques Perrin, who has died aged 80.
Perrin was already established as a bright young thing of French and Italian cinema before Demy cast him in this big-budget extravaganza alongside Gene Kelly, George Chakiris and Françoise Dorléac, Deneuve’s sister. His roles for Demy – he also played a handsome prince in the director’s fairytale musical Peau d’Âne (Donkey Skin, 1970) – remained the ones for which he was most fondly remembered, even as he insisted: “These characters were not me.”
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