Belmondo, French film’s handsome devil, dies at 88

With his devil-may-care charm, Jean-Paul Belmondo, who has died aged 88, was the poster boy of the New Wave, France’s James Dean and Humphrey Bogart rolled into one irresistible man.
With his boxer’s physique and broken nose, his restless insouciance chimed with the mould-breaking French cinema of the 1960s.
Director Jean-Luc Godard, the New Wave’s brilliant enfant terrible, cast Belmondo in his break-out role as a doomed thug who falls in love with the Jean Seberg’s pixie-like American in Paris in Breathless (1961).
The film floored critics and audiences worldwide and, with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, changed the history of cinema.
Time magazine in 1964 declared Belmondo the face of modern France.
“The Tricolour, a snifter of cognac, a flaring hem – these have been demoted to secondary symbols of France,” it said.
“The primary symbol is an image of a young man slouching in a café chair... he is Jean-Paul Belmondo – the natural son of the Existentialist conception, standing for everything and nothing at 738mph.”
Yet Belmondo was far from a sauve intellectual and spent most of his career in he-man roles that played on his raw sex appeal.

Despite making his name as a...