Robert Hossein
Encyclopedia
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
film actor of Azeri origin, director and writer. He directed the 1982
1982 in film
-Events:* March 26 = I Ought to Be in Pictures, starring Walter Matthau, Ann-Margret and Dinah Manoff is released. Manoff would not appear in another movie until 1987's Backfire.* June = PG-rated film E.T...
adaption of Les Misérables
Les Misérables (1982 film)
Les Misérables is a 1982 French drama film directed by Robert Hossein. It is one of the numerous screen adaptation of the novel of the same name by Victor Hugo.-Plot summary:...
, and appeared in Vice and Virtue
Vice and Virtue
Vice and Virtue is a 1963 war-time French film starring Annie Girardot, Robert Hossein and Catherine Deneuve, in her first notable film role....
, Le Casse
Le Casse
Le Casse is a 1971 movie directed by French director Henri Verneuil, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Omar Sharif and Robert Hossein. It is based on the 1953 novel by David Goodis and revolves around a team of four burglars chased by a corrupt cop in Athens...
, Les Uns et les Autres
Les Uns et les Autres
Les Uns et les Autres is a 1981 French film by Claude Lelouch. The film is a musical epic and it is widely considered as the director's best work with Un Homme et une Femme. It won the Technical Grand Prize at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. In the United States, it was distributed under the name...
and Venus Beauty Institute
Venus Beauty Institute
Venus Beauty Institute is a 1999 French movie, telling the story of three employees of a beauty parlor in search of love and happiness.The film is directed by Tonie Marshall...
. His most recent roles include starring as Michèle Mercier
Michèle Mercier
Michèle Mercier, is a French actress. In the course of her career she has worked with leading directors like François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Deray, Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, Mario Bava, Peter Collinson and Ken Annakin...
's husband in the Angélique series and as a Catholic priest
Priest
A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities...
who falls in love with Claude Jade
Claude Jade
Claude Marcelle Jorré, better known as Claude Jade , was a French actress, known for starring as Christine in François Truffaut's three films Stolen Kisses , Bed and Board and Love on the Run . Jade acted in theatre, film and television...
and becomes a communist in Prêtres interdits (Forbidden Priests
Forbidden Priests
Forbidden Priests is a French film directed by Denys de La Patellière in 1973 starring Robert Hossein and Claude Jade.-Synopsis:...
) in 1973.
Hossein started directing films in 1956 with Les salauds vont en enfer from a story by Frédéric Dard
Frédéric Dard
Frédéric Dard was a French writer and author of the San-Antonio series..-Biography:...
whose novels and plays went on to furnish Hossein with much of his later film material. Right from the start Hossein established his characteristic trademarks: using a seemingly straightforward suspense
Suspense
Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead-up to a big event or dramatic...
plot and subverting its conventions (sometimes to the extent of a complete disregard of the traditional demand for a final twist or revelation) in order to concentrate on ritualistic relationships. This is the director's running preoccupation which is always stressed in his films by an extraordinary command of film space and often striking frame compositions where the geometry of human figures and set design is used to accentuate the psychological set-up of the scene. The mechanisms of guilt and the way it destroys relationships is another recurring theme, presumably influenced by Hossein's lifelong interest in the works of Dostoyevski.
Although Hossein had some modest international successes with films like Toi, le venin
Toi, le venin
Toi, le venin is a 1958 French crime drama film directed and written by Robert Hossein, based on novel C'est toi le venin... by Frédéric Dard. The music score was by André Hossein...
and Le vampire de Dusseldorf, he was much singled out for scorching criticism by the critics and followers of the New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
for the unashamedly melodramatic frameworks of his films. The fact that he was essentially an auteur director with a consistent set of themes and an extraordinary mastery of original and unusual approaches to staging his stories, was never appreciated. He was not averse to trying his hand at widely different genres and was never defeated, making the strikingly different spaghetti western
Spaghetti Western
Spaghetti Western, also known as Italo-Western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's unique and much copied film-making style and international box-office success, so named by American critics because most were produced and...
Une corde, un Colt and the low-budgeted but daringly subversive period drama I Killed Rasputin
I Killed Rasputin
I Killed Rasputin is a 1967 Italo-Franco biographical film directed by Robert Hossein. Gert Fröbe stars as the main subject, Grigori Rasputin. It is based on the work Lost Splendor by Felix Yusupov, a nobleman and participant in the murder of Rasputin. The script was approved by Yusupov and he...
. However, because of the lack of wider success and continuing adverse criticism, Hossein virtually ended his film directing career in 1970, having concentrated on theatre where his achievements were never questioned, and subsequently returning to film directing only twice. With two or three exceptions, his films remain commercially unavailable and very difficult to see.
He is the son of André Hossein a Zoroastrian French composer of Azerbaijani-Tajik descent, and a Jewish
History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
The vast territories of the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest populations of Jews in the diaspora. Within these territories the Jewish community flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of...
comedy actress from Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
. He was married three times: first to Marina Vlady
Marina Vlady
Marina Vlady is a French actress.She won the Best Actress Award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival for The Conjugal Bed. From 1955 to 1959 she was married to actor/director Robert Hossein...
(he has two sons with her, Pierre and Igor), later to Caroline Eliacheff (with whom he has a son, Nicholas). He is currently married to actress Candice Patou, with whom he has one son, Julien.
According to an article written by Emannuel Peze, Hossein experienced a conversion to Catholicism in 1971 during a visit to the Marian apparition at San Damiano in Lombardo Italy.
Selected filmography
- The Dirty GameThe Dirty GameThe Dirty Game is a 1965 portmanteau spy film starring Henry Fonda and Robert Ryan.The original film had Robert Ryan linking four different spy stories, each helmed by a different director; original James Bond director Terence Young for the English sequences, Christian-Jaque for the French, Carlo...
(1965) - God's ThunderGod's ThunderGod's Thunder or Le Tonnerre de Dieu is a 1965 French, Italian and West German produced comedy film, directed by Denys de La Patellière. The film is set in Nantes.-Cast:*Jean Gabin ... Léandre Brassac*Michèle Mercier ... Simone Leboucher...
(1965) - Les Uns et les AutresLes Uns et les AutresLes Uns et les Autres is a 1981 French film by Claude Lelouch. The film is a musical epic and it is widely considered as the director's best work with Un Homme et une Femme. It won the Technical Grand Prize at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. In the United States, it was distributed under the name...
(1981) - Les MisérablesLes Misérables (1995 film)Les Misérables is a 1995 film written and directed by Claude Lelouch. Set in France during World War II, it concerns a poor and illiterate man Henri Fortin who is introduced to Victor Hugo's classic novel Les Misérables and begins to see parallels between it and his own life.-Plot:The film starts...
(1995) - A Man and His DogA Man and His DogA Man and His Dog is a 2009 French film directed by French director Francis Huster, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, based on the 1952 film Umberto D...
(2009)