Pierre Bertin

Pierre Bertin — Biography

For decades, French character actor Pierre Bertin worked on both stage and screen, often in supporting parts. Alongside acting he directed and designed sets for the theatre. He wrote the libretto of the comic opera La Gageure imprévue, first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1944, and contributed to the radio opera Les Deux Rendez-vous, first broadcast in 1951. He received the prix Littré.

His film career began in the war years, with Gaston Noblet in Péchés de jeunesse (1941) and the abbé Loth in The Queen's Necklace (1946). The turning point was Sacha Guitry's The Lame Devil (1948), in which he took the lead. Orfe (1950), Dr. Knock (1951, as the schoolteacher Bernard) and Elena and Her Men (1956, as Martin-Michaud) followed.

From 1960 he mostly played figures of authority: the Marquis de la Force in Dialogue with the Carmelites, Monsieur Belin in Les Bonnes Femmes (both 1960), Adolphe Amédée Delafoy in Monsieur Gangster (1963), a court president in How to Keep the Red Lamp Burning (1965) and a judge in The Stranger (1967). In his last decade on screen he played the poet Jérôme Dieudonné in L'Oiseau rare (1973), a canon in Calmos (1976) and the old Casseur in The New Beaujolais Wine Has Arrived... (1978).