Jean-Louis Trintignant

Coolly cerebral and internal where French New Wave peers Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon leaned toward the physical and intense, Jean-Louis Trintignant enjoyed a five-decade career as an actor in some of arthouse cinema's most acclaimed films, from "And God Created Woman" (1956) and "A Man and a Woman" (1966) to "Z" (1969), "Three Colors: Red: (1994) and "Amour" (2012). His languid features and economical performing style earmarked him for young romantics, which he personified in Claude Lelouch's international success "A Man and a Woman." But Trintignant resisted pigeonholing, preferring instead to play complicated, challenged figures on both sides of the law in dozens of political dramas and crime dramas during the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably "The Conformist" (1970), as a faceless factotum who traded his basic values for social acceptance. His international profile faded in the 1980s, but he enjoyed returns to prominence with Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors: Red" (1994) and Michael Haneke's "Amour" (2012). Though never a major international star, Trintignant's vast and critically revered body of work made him one of the most respected actors of the 20th century on both sides of the pond.