Julien Guiomar(1928-2010)
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Passionate about acting, Julien Guiomar has left a lasting imprint on
the theater (since 1952), on television (since 1958) and on the big
screen (since 1966) in a career spanning five decades. And yet, Guiomar
first saw himself as a dentist, ... like Daddy! But he finally proved
the saying 'Like father like song' wrong. Too bad for dentistry but so
much the better for entertainment which otherwise would have had to do
without his singular talent. And, to tell the truth, Julien Guiomar did
not coddle himself. He indeed appeared in over thirty plays with
Jean Vilar's famed Théâtre National Populaire
(TNP); he was in more than forty TV films, in which his incredible
presence allowed him to embody such figures as Alexandre Borgia or
Diafoirus in Molière's
Le malade imaginaire (1971).
His film parts are even more numerous and include authority figures
(colonels, police commissioners, prelates and even God Himself in
Arthur Joffé's curious comedy
Let There Be Light (1998).
As of his first two appearances, in
Philippe de Broca's
King of Hearts (1966), as a
lunatic who takes himself for a bishop and in
Louis Malle's
The Thief of Paris (1967) as a phony priest,
Julien Guiomar has imposed an image of authority tinged with
eccentricity. Always colorful in his expression, he can also exert
sheer spitefulness (the colonel in
Costa-Gavras
Z (1969)) or warm humanity (the surgeon of
Serge Korber's
Je vous ferai aimer la vie (1979)).
He may have been in too many campy comedies but he saves them from
total crassness by his mere inspired presence. Julien Guiomar retired
in 2004 after a final TV Film.