In a stage and film career spanning fifty years, with appearances in around 80 films – from the Golden Age of cinema up to the upheavals of the 1960s – Pierre Brasseur is regarded as one of the finest French actors of his generation.  Considered by many as the last of the monstres sacrés of French cinema, his artistic talents were not restricted just to acting – he was also an accomplished writer and painter.

His real name was Pierre-Albert Espinasse and he was born in 1905 in Batignolles, France.  Both his parents were actors and he took an interest in acting from an early age, making his stage debut at the age of 18.  He studied drama at the Paris Conservatory, and then under Fernand Ledoux and Harry Baur.  In the 1920s, he mixed with the artists and poets of Montparnasse in Paris, where he developed a particular interest in surrealism.  However, it was his friendship with Max Jacob and Marcel Dalio which set him on course for a career as an actor.

Having appeared in a few silent films, he moved to Germany in 1931 to work at the UFA studios.  There he appeared in French versions of run-of-the-mill films by Paul Martin, Karl Hartl and Kurt Gerron.   He made more headway with his stage career,which included such successes as On ne badine pas avec l’amour (1936) and Claudine à l’école (1937).

The year in which Pierre Brasseur finally made his breakthrough in cinema was 1938, where he made several notable appearances, in films such as Grisou, Café de Paris and, most significantly, Le quai des brumes.

At the start of World War Two, Brasseur returned to the stage, and went on tour with his theatre company.  He starred along side his wife Odette Joyeux and their five-year old son Claude in the play Domino, with performances as far a field as North Africa. 

In 1942, Jean Grémillon provided him with the opportunity to give one of his best screen performances in the controversial Lumière d’été (1942).  This was followed by probably the most important role of Brasseur’s career, the part of the womanising Frédéric Lemaître in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1943-1945).  This is perhaps the closest that Brasseur came to portraying himself on screen, an actor playing an actor with an evident love for his profession. 

After the war, Brasseur gravitated to much darker, more complex roles, including the title role in Christian-Jaque’s film Barbe-Bleue   (1951), the criminally insane uncle in Les Grandes familles, the sinister surgeon in Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage (1960) and the cruel dictator in Borowczyk’s bizarre Goto, l'île d'amour (1969). 

Other films gave Brasseur the opportunity to play more humane parts, such as in Bolognini’s Il Bell'Antonio (1960) and Michel Deville’s Lucky Joe (1964).  In René Clair’s Porte des Lilas (1956), he played a sympathetic down-and-out in one of his best comic performances.   Meanwhile, he was pursuing a successful stage career, one of his biggest successes being Jean-Paul Sarte’s Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (1951).

Pierre Brasseur continued his stage and film career throughout the 1960s and even made a few tentative television appearances in the late 1960s.  In 1972, he published his colourful memoirs, “Ma vie en vrac” .  He died at Brunico in Italy on 14th August 1972, leaving his son Claude to carry on the celebrated Brasseur tradition.