- Jean-Francois Gerraud, Une histoire simple, France-West Germany, 1978. “Arditi! Arditi! Arditi!” Dominique Besnehard’s message to auteur Claude Sauetet. The young casting icon in the making admitted to a fixation on Arditi – a big hit on the Paris stage in Vaclav Havel’s Audience et Vermissage. Sautet did not agree! (He didn’t go for Florence Giorgetti, either – Arditi’s lover, and mother of their painter son, Frederic). Some years later, when a regular in Alain Resnais films, Arditi became sole winner in one single year of the rare triple of French awards as best film, stage and TV actor!
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Jean-Louis Trintignant, Vivement dimanche (UK: Finally Sunday!; US: Confidentially Yours, aka: Let It Be Sunday), France, 1982. François Truffaut’s Family Plot-ish farewell was his affectionate tribute to Hitchcock and B-movies, via Charles Williams’ US pulp, The Long Saturday Night… and a treat for his lover, Fanny Ardant, sort of reprising Lucille Ball’s secretary aiding her boss Mark Stevens in The Dark Corner, 1945. New York Times critic Vincent Canby found it flat. “I have the terrible feeling I’ve missed the point” – which was that Truffaut was dying when he made it and dead two months after the joyfui release. OK, he only got to play Fanny’s boss because Arditi was in a play, but this marked the great Jean-Louis Trintignant’s only Truffaut film “I don’t know him,” he told me during a memorable interview in Paris, 1979. “We met once – in a lift. I was convinced the reason he never asked for me in any of his films was because I knew [director Claude] Lelouch. Truffaut must hate Lelouch! But as you mentioned, each time Truffaut had a part that suited me, he played it. But he’s wrong, because I’m a better actor than he is. I do rather resemble him, but I’m better looking, too!”
- Bernard Giraudeau, Ridicule, France, 1995. Too much attached to Resnais perhaps, Arditi rejected realisateur Patrice Leconte’s offer to play the 18th Century L’Abbé de Vilecourt – when wit ruled at at the court of Louis XVI.Giraudeau had starred in Leconte’s 1983 actioner, Les spécialistes.
- Lambert Wilson, Cœurs (Private Fears in Public Places) France, 2006. For the second Alain and Alan meeting – aged French nouvelle vague icon Resnais, and UK playwright Ayckbourn – Arditi played the drunken ex-army officer in some rehearsals opposite Benoit Poelvoorde’s suave bartender. The Belgian actor did not really mesh with Resnais – and Arditi tended bar in the eighth of his nine Resnais films. Poelvoorde went home and Wilson joined the officer ranks.
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 3