Daniel Auteuil Movies
One of France's most respected actors, Daniel Auteuil has established himself as a performer at ease in any number of genres, ranging from period dramas to romantic comedies to crime thrillers. The son of opera singers, he was born in Algeria on January 24, 1950. He started his career in musical comedy and made his film debut in 1972. After starring in a number of forgettable comedies, Auteuil had his breakthrough playing the scheming farmer Ugolin in Jean de Florette (1986). He won a Best Actor César and a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA for his portrayal, and that same year he earned further acclaim for his work in the film's equally popular sequel, Manon des Sources. Auteuil's involvement in Manon had the added benefit of introducing him to costar Emmanuelle Béart, with whom he would have a ten-year relationship that produced a daughter, born in 1992.The awards he earned for his portrayal of Ugolin established him as one of his country's most promising actors, and Auteuil subsequently became known for his work as one of the screen's most accomplished purveyors of emotional turmoil. His searching, conflicted portrayals found particularly effective expression in such films as Un Coeur en Hiver (1992), for which he won the European Film Academy's Best Actor award; Ma Saison Préférée (1993), in which he and Catherine Deneuve starred as siblings with an unnatural bond; La Séparation (1994), for which earned a César nomination for his portrayal of a husband undergoing a nervous breakdown; La Reine Margot (1994), in which he played the cuckolded Henri of Navarre; Le Huitième Jour, in which he played an emotionally stunted workaholic; and Les Voleurs (1996), a crime drama in which he and Deneuve were again cast as a brother and sister. In 1999, Auteuil made one of his few English language outings in Chris Menges' Lost Son, playing a detective living in self-exile in London who gets caught up in a pedophilia ring. That same year, he collaborated with celebrated director Patrice Leconte on La fille sur le pont, playing a knife-thrower who embarks on a journey across Europe with a suicidal young woman (Vanessa Paradis). ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
- 1972
French director Claude Berri wrote, directed, and stars in this comedy as Claude, a bookstore owner whose personal life, like his struggling business, is failing. Claude is trapped in a loveless marriage to Isabelle (Juliet Berto), who does not seem to possess any sexual attraction to her husband or affection for her children. The only activity Isabelle does seem to relish is shopping, which means spending Claude's hard-earned income. Then salvation arrives in the form of a business brainstorm. Claude transforms the bookstore into a sex shop, selling everything from leather bondage paraphernalia to pornography; soon business takes off. The proprietorship of the sex shop and his friendship with a sexually uninhibited customer, Jacqueline (Nathalie Delon), open up new possibilities for Claude, and he realizes that he's been repressed. Although he encourages Isabelle to join him in his new erotic adventures, she is at first reluctant to embrace the swinging lifestyle; the couple's attempts at a ménage à trois are disastrous. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean-Pierre Marielle, Claude Piéplu, (more)
- 1977
Nicole is a nurse, with a boyfriend in the military, who lives at home with her mother. One night, while returning home on her motorcycle, she is forced off the road by four men driving a delivery van, and she is raped. Afterward, she is secretly sent by her family to a hospital to recover. However, she is determined to discover the meaning of this awful event and presses charges against the men, who prove to be very ordinary, and not the monsters she had imagined them to be. This proves to be a sobering, even chilling realization. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Nathalie Nell, Alain Foures, (more)
- 1977
In this family comedy, Papa (Claude Brasseur) has no end of trouble getting his young son to accept his new girlfriend. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Claude Brasseur, Nathalie Baye, (more)
- 1977
This French psychological detective drama owes much of its tone to Existentialism, even though that philosophy had its heyday at least a decade earlier. In the story, set in the 1950s, Nestor (Michel Galabru) is a small-time private detective who is doing a small-time job, searching for some missing jewels. When the activities of a serial murderer cross his path and interrupt his search, he turns his efforts to tracking him down. The killer is the son of a local policeman and feels that he is somehow above the ordinary concerns of mere mortals: his murders are his way of proving this. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michel Galabru, Mort Shuman, (more)
- 1979
Two frowsty middle-aged men, cousins, live and work together. In this ironic satire/drama, they are cowardly, tricky and mean-spirited, but at least they have each other. When they take to testing the alarm system of the bank that they work in after what is for them a particularly scary moment, their boss sends them away on a holiday. They manage to pick up and seduce a pretty hitchhiker before discovering that she is a runaway minor with a reward pending for her return. They bring her back to her family, collect the reward, and get told off by the girl before returning to their homes. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Jugnot, (more)
- 1980
The thin plot that ties the story of Clara (Isabelle Adjani) and Bertrand (Thierry Lhermitte), the man pursuing her, to a newly-formed rock band is fleshed out by the young actors, several of them cafe-theater players making a transition to the "big screen." The actors play six young "twenty-somethings" in Grenoble who decide to make a go of otherwise routine lives by forming a rock band called the "Why Notes." The story opens with their trip to Paris for the weekend and closes with their coming home. In between, Bertrand is after Clara who has just abandoned her husband of a few hours. In the end, what happens "in between" may not be as relevant as the way in which the characters live, speak, and act. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Josiane Balasko, (more)
- 1980
A few bumps in modern education provide an underlying, tongue-in-cheek theme for this enjoyable comedy by Claude Zidi. The story centers around a graduating class of "less-gifted" students in a private Versailles high school. Only a miracle has brought the students this far along, and after a practical joke misfires and the whole school is dynamited, the students are in deep trouble. They have to present themselves in court for their punishment and it could not be worse. They either have to go to prison, or manage to pass their high-school graduation exams. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Maria Pacome, Hubert Deschamps, (more)
- 1981
This comedy features large French woman, Balasko, who, when dumped by her fiance, moves in with a silly model. ~ All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Josiane Balasko, Ariane Larteguy, (more)
- 1982
Andre Joeuf (Jean Poiret) is the coldly calculating president of an insurance company who, when faced with the imperative of firing some of his highly paid executives, invites them all over to his country estate for a weekend to indulge in a few games of musical chairs. Anyone left standing after each round will be out his job. The mix of people at the estate and their relationships to each other and their boss, as well as the character of the boss himself, are enough to make most business majors switch to art history. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean Poiret, Daniel Auteuil, (more)
- 1982
Having just seen a successful robbery, a man (Daniel Auteuil) and his roommate (Gerard Jugnot) are inspired to rob a bank themselves for some ready cash. When they burst in on the bank with their toy machine guns, most of the tellers and staff are frightened and wary, but in one case, a member of the bank staff has to show the robbers how to carry out their plan because they really do not know what they are doing. After getting to know the robbers better, the bank staff are struck by a serious conflict of interest -- should they remain loyal to the bank or not? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Anémone, (more)
- 1983
In this conventional detective-thriller, Dominique (Thierry Lhermitte) is the sidekick of the gangster Malaggione (Bernard Pierre Donnadieu), and when he falls in love with Sylvie (Pascale Rocard) -- a good-hearted, relatively naïve woman -- he promises he will do only "one last job" and then quit. In the meantime, detective Bertrand (Daniel Auteuil) is hot on the gangster's trail and coerces information out of Sylvie that is supposed to lead to Malaggione's arrest -- but Malaggione escapes and hunts down Dominique, who confesses to "talking" in order to save Sylvie from blame. The ending is fairly predictable, as Dominique, Sylvie, the detective, and the gangster must come to some final accounting when their paths begin to cross. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Thierry Lhermitte, (more)
- 1984
Meant to be an action-packed thriller about city gangs fighting for a piece of a lucrative drug shipment, this mindless, violent, stereotyped series of killings ruins credibility by its own excesses. A crooked, neo-Nazi police inspector supplies his gangland cohorts with weapons to slaughter the Vietnamese, black, and Arab gangs fighting for the upper hand in the drug trade. Before the final showdown, an undercover cop (Daniel Auteuil) tries to prevent the bloodshed and faces one defeat after another as his connections and informants are killed. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Marisa Berenson, (more)
- 1984
In this embarrassment of an action thriller, the poor storyline and direction are only matched by the underpar acting, all to tell the tale of Berg (Daniel Auteuil), a young stunt car driver who leaves his profession and starts working at a private security service when his lover is killed in an accident at one of their meets. The young man's future is threatened by his dead lover's brother, who had an incestuous love for his sister, and is now out to wreak vengence on Berg for her death. Loud and shrill, the dialogue alone would grate on a viewer's nerves, even if its content were better. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Philippe Léotard, Daniel Auteuil, (more)
- 1984
Director Gérard Lauzier shoots diatribes at "liberals" from his own conservative perspective in this movie about a rebellious teenager leaving his bourgeois parents. Humor lightens the theme more than once, as when the besieged father -- after listening to a garbled harangue on Marx from his inspired son during a drive together, -- immediately seeks out motorists on the street to find out if he oppresses them. The son first rebels by moving upstairs to a maid's room and then moves out to stay with a supposedly "emancipated" family -- only to have everyone in the family try to seduce him -- brother, sister, mother, and father but not necessarily in that order or combination. Disillusioned, the son has to reconfigure his belief system and retrench. The salty French title of this film is typical of Lauzier's comic-strip humor, and his cartoon "Memoirs of a Young Man" provided the basis for P'tit Con. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Bernard Brieux, Guy Marchand, (more)
- 1985
In this standard romantic drama, a tangled web of relationships may not be that easy to straighten out for the people involved. Marc (Daniel Auteuil) is a lawyer married to Jeanne (Sophie Barjac), but his roving eye leads him into sexual encounters with other women on a regular basis -- and although his wife loves him deeply, she throws him out one day when she can no longer stand his philandering. After their split, she begins a romantic fling with Antoine (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who moves in with her after awhile. At the same time, Marc meets and falls in love with Samantha (Emmanuelle Beart), a prostitute who reciprocates his feelings. Circumstances place all four -- Marc, Samantha, Jeanne, and Antoine under the same roof -- a combination of cross-references that soon threatens to disintegrate, at least in part. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Pierre Marielle, (more)
- 1985
In a standard story of brotherly conflict during the severity of detention in a German prison camp at the end of World War II, Robert (Claude Brasseur) has privileges that make him want to keep his status quo intact, while his brother Lucien (Daniel Auteuil) is anxious to escape and get back to the resistance movement. Robert is a pianist with enough talent that the Germans requisition him to entertain at a nearby hotel. His life is so close to normal that he even starts an affair with Hanna (Gudrun Landgrebe), the manager of the hotel. But when Lucien becomes hunted by the Germans as a POW who escaped his captors, Robert is forced to hide him in the prison camp. From that point onward, the brothers disagree on what to do next. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Claude Brasseur, Daniel Auteuil, (more)
- 1986
With ingenious camera work, witty dialogue, and a setting that almost never wanders from the cavernous interior of a mod cafe-bar, this drama by Michel Deville has a lot of pluses. A woman (Jeanne Moreau) and a man (Michel Piccoli, the "nonentity" of the title) jointly run the vast cafe and every night play host to the same four men as they sit around a card table -- a doctor, a journalist, a merchant, and a professor. A seductive woman (Fanny Ardant) lounges around in a hammock nearby. When the police commissioner starts investigating a murder, the four card players become suspects. Charming bits show an irritable "paltoquet" shoving the opening credits off the screen so the story can get going. He also sits around reading the novel from which the screenplay was adapted and provides music with a portable record player. These inventive touches allow the movie to work on several levels at once. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michel Piccoli, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
- 1986
- PG
Co-adapted by director Claude Berri from a novel by Marcel Pagnol, this hugely successful French historical drama concerns a bizarre battle royale over a valuable natural spring in a remote French farming community. City dweller Jean Cadoret (Gérard Depardieu) assumes ownership of the spring when the original owner is accidentally killed by covetous farmer Cesar Soubeyran (Yves Montand). Soubeyran and his equally disreputable nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) pull every dirty trick in the book to force Cadoret off his land, but the novice farmer stands firm. Although the Soubeyrans appear to gain the upper hand, the audience is assured that they will eventually be foiled by the vengeful daughter of the spring's deceased owner -- thus setting the stage for the film's equally successful sequel, Manon of the Spring. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, (more)
Manon of the Spring (Manon des Sources) has also been released as Jean de Florette II in the US, as it is a sequel to Claude Berri's Jean de Florette. Both films are drawn from the same source: Filmmaker/novelist Marcel Pagnol's 1952 rural romance, also titled Jean de Florette. Manon (Emmanuelle Beart), now fully grown, is a shepherdess who prefers to keep her distance from the local villagers. She is determined to uncover the truth behind the death of her father (played by Gerard Depardieu in Jean de Florette) and to wreak vengeance on the men she holds responsible. The more sympathetic of the two men, Ugolin (Daniel Auteil), is in love with Manon, but this does not weaken her resolve. She causes the village's water supply to diminish, blaming this action upon Ugolin and his duplicitous co-conspirator Cesar (Yves Montand). The upshot of this vengeful behavior ends in tragedy for all concerned. The joint winners of eight French Cesar awards, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring were released to the U.S. in tandem in 1987. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, (more)
- 1988
- PG13
Claude Sautet's A Few Days With Me (Quelque Jours avec Moi) stars Daniel Auteuil as the emotionally disturbed heir to a supermarket empire. Auteuil's mother Danielle Darrieux tries to give her son some purpose in life by assigning him the task of reinvigorating one of the supermarket chain's least profitable links. Every effort Auteuil makes to reach out and communicate with his employees is doomed to failure due to his conscious and unconscious insensitivities. He is humanized by a brief affair with maid Sandrine Bonnaire. The romance doesn't last, and Auteuil ends up back in a mental institution, but still there is a ray of hope for him in the final scenes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Sandrine Bonnaire, (more)
- 1989
- PG
This easygoing French comedy -- originally and more wittily titled Romuald et Juliette -- is about conservative Parisian yogurt-company CEO named Romuald Blindet (Daniel Auteuil) who by circumstance finds himself drawing closer to his black cleaning woman Juliette Bonaventure (Firmine Richard). A romance soon develops between them. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Firmine Richard, (more)
- 1990
Pierre Lacenaire is among the most notorious killers in French history. This well-wrought drama, tells his story. It begins in 1836 as the icy but somehow charming and intellectual Lacenaire awaits his execution and through a series of flashbacks chronicles the events and reasons why he has ended up on Death Row. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Jean Poiret, (more)
- 1991
Léah (Josiane Balasko) has been longing to be beautiful for years, but the best she's been able to accomplish on her own is dowdy but neat. When she inadvertently conjures up Abar (Daniel Auteuil), one of the devil's own representatives, she's more than willing to sell her soul for a great-looking, sexy body (Jessica Forde), especially if she can woo Abar with it. Alas, it seems that these contracts are frequently renewed by the Angel Gabriel (Michael Lonsdale), and just as she's getting ready to get things hopping, the angelic trumpeter says the deal's off. Now she's got her soul and body back, but she's still in bad, bad trouble because the guy she loves happens to be a devil. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Josiane Balasko, (more)
