Jacques Charrier, a French actor who as the ephemeral second husband of Brigitte Bardot earned a brief turn in the spotlight before years of obscurity, died on Wednesday at his home in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, on the Brittany coast. He was 88.
His death was announced by France’s culture minister, Rachida Dati.
They were France’s glamour couple of the late 1950s: Mr. Charrier, with several hit movies to his credit, “a cross,” Le Monde wrote, “between James Dean and Gérard Philipe,” the French matinee idol; and Ms. Bardot, who had just become an international sex symbol thanks to her barely clothed performance in Roger Vadim’s 1956 movie “And God Created Woman.”
Their wedding, in June 1959 in the town of Louveciennes, was overrun by a mass of reporters, who quickly got the better of the security guards. Even the staid Le Monde covered it, reporting the exact time at which the couple joined hands: 11:30 a.m.
But the idyll quickly turned sour and ended in bitterness. Their unhappiness was intensified by Ms. Bardot’s pregnancy — “nine nightmarish months,” she wrote in her 1996 memoir, “Initiales B.B.” She made it clear then and afterward that the birth of her only child, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, was deeply unwelcome. She would have preferred “giving birth to a dog,” she wrote.
After his son’s birth, in 1960, Mr. Charrier was hospitalized for nervous depression (duly covered by Le Monde, which reassured its readers that it was not serious), and Ms. Bardot attempted suicide. They were divorced in 1963.
Mr. Charrier gained custody of their son, and the onetime movie idol began a slow slide into obscurity. He acted in over a dozen films through the 1960s and ’70s, including several directed by Claude Chabrol and one by Jean-Luc Godard (“Anticipation, ou l’Amour en l’An 2000,” 1967). But he quit the movie business after a 1975 film he produced (but did not act in) — “Il Pleut sur Santiago,” centered on the 1973 coup in Chile — bombed. (The film, which starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, was spoiled by its “didacticism,” Le Monde wrote.)
In subsequent years, Mr. Charrier turned his attention to ceramics and especially painting, exhibiting in Paris, Geneva and elsewhere. About a decade ago, he retired peacefully to the seaside village of Saint-Briac. In a statement, Ms. Dati, the French culture minister, said that Mr. Charrier’s “discretion and elegance” would “remain in our memories.”
It was a quiet final chapter. But, for a few years at the end of the 1950s, Mr. Charrier had been the toast of France.
His breakthrough came in the 1958 film “Les Tricheurs” (released in the United States as both “Young Sinners” and “The Cheaters”), a story of decadent Parisian youth directed by Marcel Carné. Mr. Charrier played opposite Pascale Petit — “as pretty a pair of virile youngsters as you are likely to meet,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times — as a rather hapless young partygoer. The film had “the qualities of a tract on the evils of youthful misbehavior,” Mr. Crowther wrote, and it already seemed dated by the time it reached America in 1961.
But in Europe it had been a huge box-office success, and it brought Mr. Charrier to the attention of Ms. Bardot, who was already a star. She insisted he appear in her next film, “Babette Goes to War,” a World War II spoof. Released in 1959, it was also a big success.
They were married that June. In the fall, Mr. Charrier briefly became the center of a national security debate in France, a country then embroiled in war in Algeria. The French press reported that, rather than serving in his regiment, Mr. Charrier was busy finishing a film and claiming medical exemptions.
Roland Boudet, a Gaullist deputy, denounced him on the floor of Parliament, to “applause and laughter,” Le Monde reported at the time. “I would like to know what measures the government intends to undertake so that all of our recruits are treated exactly the same,” Mr. Boudet said, “even when they emerge from the world of high fashion or the arms of a big star.”
Mr. Charrier did himself no favors when he then turned down the leading role in the René Clement thriller “Purple Noon.” (Ms. Bardot was pregnant, he explained.) Alain Delon took his place. Mr. Charrier’s career was coming to an end.
Jacques Joseph Henri Charrier was born on Nov. 6, 1936, in the town of Metz, the son of Joseph Jules Léon Charrier, a career military officer then stationed there, and Marie Marguerite (Vuillaume) Charrier.
At 17, he entered the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg to study pottery. Three years later he was studying at the National School for the Dramatic Arts in Paris. After gaining a spot as an extra at the Comédie Française, he was made the male lead in a dramatization of “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the Théâtre Montparnasse.
Mr. Carné, a celebrated French filmmaker who had directed “The Children of Paradise” during the war, spotted him there, and his career was made.
Mr. Charrier had been discreetly out of the public eye for nearly three decades when Ms. Bardot published her memoirs, which included a section viciously attacking him as a bourgeois loser, a freeloader and an egotist. As for her son, she wrote, when he was presented to her at his birth, “I started to cry, begging that he be taken off of me.”
Mr. Charrier sued, demanding that the 80 pages devoted to him and his son be suppressed. Though he was awarded modest damages, Ms. Bardot’s book was already a best seller.
Mr. Charrier is survived by his son; his fourth wife, the Japanese photographer Makiko; three daughters from earlier marriages, Marie, Sophie, and Rosalie; and grandchildren.
Mr. Charrier got back at Ms. Bardot not long after the release of her memoir when he published “Ma Réponse à Brigitte Bardot” (“My Reply to Brigitte Bardot”), in which he revealed that the star, well known for her far-right political sympathies, had given him her father’s library, including a signed copy of “Mein Kampf.” Ms. Bardot countersued and lost.
Mr. Charrier explained that he had published his book “for my children, to re-establish the truth.”
“If I could simply focus on my painting,” he added, “I assure you that I would have happily passed on this kind of publicity.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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