The actor Michel Bouquet, who has died aged 96, was already middle-aged by the time he found fame playing baleful, corrupt or complacent figures in films by the New Wave provocateur Claude Chabrol. He was a cuckolded husband who kills his wife’s lover in La Femme Infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1969) and an advertising executive who accidentally kills his own lover in Juste Avant La Nuit (Just Before Nightfall, 1971). In between, he did some of his wickedest work as a wealthy tyrant besmirching his daughter-in-law’s name as he plots to gain custody of his grandson in La Rupture (The Breach, 1970). Each of these films paired him with the director’s wife, Stéphane Audran, and portrayed “the petit bourgeois household as unsparingly as Thérèse Raquin or Madame Bovary”, as the critic Nigel Andrews put it.
Bouquet lent the most unsavoury characters a compelling inner life, even when they lingered only briefly on screen. In François Truffaut’s Hitchcockian thriller The Bride Wore Black (1968), he was one of the men murdered by a widow (Jeanne Moreau) seeking revenge for her husband’s death. His demise is especially grisly – he expires on the floor of his seedy hotel room after being poisoned – but the actor conveyed hidden dimensions which made the victim a plausibly pitiful figure, rather than merely cannon fodder. (“I can count on one, no, two hands how many women I’ve had,” he says.) He was equally fine, though scarcely more likable, as a detective in Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid (1969).
