Jeanpaul Belmondo

Diagnoses

Vocation

Lifestyle

Family

French actor hailed as cinema's new anti-hero in 1957, an overnight success in "A Bout de Souffle." A former boxer, he has rough features including a broken nose, a rakish grin and gruff sex appeal. His films are mainly semi-serious adventures where he plays a good humored criminal or carefree blackguard. One of France's leading box office attractions for over 30 years, he performed in films that ranged from avant-garde classics to popular action-packed thrillers. Born into an aristocratic family and the son of a well known sculptor, Belmondo attended fancy private schools and studied drama at the Paris Conservatory, where he met with early success. He has dangled from a helicopter over Paris, crawled across the roof of a moving subway car in pursuit of a murderer and frolicked with a Bengal tiger. He felt that none of these feats compared to his return to the stage in 1987 for causing sheer terror. On 3/03/1987, "Kean," a five-act play, opened in Paris. "I could have died with my legend," he said, "but I wanted to take a risk, prove myself, hear my own fears and conquer them." In recent years, Belmondo's reputation has suffered due to taking more commercially successful, high-paying action roles in such films as "Cop or Holligan," 1979 and "Champion of Champions," 1982. His theater comeback is therefore the biggest cultural event of the season, covered voluminously by the media. He suffered a stroke in 2001 and had since been absent from the stage and the screen until 2009 when he appeared in Un homme et son chien (A man and his dog). In 1953, Belmondo married Élodie Constantin, with whom he had three children: Patricia (1958), Florence (1960) and Paul (1963). Paul became a Formula One driver; his eldest daughter Patricia was killed in a fire in 1994. In 1966, due to a well-publicized affair between Belmondo and actress Ursula Andress, Belmondo and his wife divorced. In 1989, Belmondo met Nathalie "Natty" Tardivel who was 24 at the time, she and Belmondo married in 2002. She tells the story that she met Belmondo the first time in 1975, when she was 10, asking him for an autograph in Paris when he walked a boulevard with Ursula Andress on his arm. On 13 August 2003, when he was 70, his fourth child Stella Eva Angelina was born. In 2008, Belmondo and Tardivel divorced. He lived with the Belgian model and TV presenter Barbara Gandolfi (born 9 August 1975) from 2008 to 2012. Link to Wikipedia biography