All Things Denner / People / Charles Denner
Charles Denner
French actor of stage and screen, 1926 to 1995
Charles Denner was a French actor whose thirty-year screen career ran from Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire to leading roles for Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle, Costa-Gavras, Claude Lelouch and François Truffaut. Born to a Jewish family in Tarnów, Poland, wounded as a teenage Resistance fighter, and celebrated in France as an actor's actor, he is best known to American audiences as Bertrand Morane in Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women (1977).
- Born
- , Tarnów, Poland
- Died
- , Dreux, France, aged 69
- Trained with
- Charles Dullin, then Jean Vilar at the Théâtre National Populaire
- Breakthrough
- Landru (1963), directed by Claude Chabrol
- Signature role
- Bertrand Morane in The Man Who Loved Women (1977)
- Honours
- Croix de Guerre, for service in the French Resistance
Early life: from Tarnów to Paris
Charles Denner was born on 29 May 1926 in Tarnów, a city in south-eastern Poland, into a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family. His father, Joseph, was a tailor. In 1930, when Charles was four, the family emigrated to France and settled in Paris, where he grew up with an early and lasting passion for the theatre.
The German occupation scattered the family south. The Denners took refuge in Brive-la-Gaillarde in the Corrèze, where the local rabbi, David Feuerwerker, helped protect them. It was during these years, in 1941, that a teenage Charles made his first screen appearance, an uncredited walk-on as a valet in Maurice Tourneur's Volpone.
Acting would have to wait. Charles and his older brother Alfred joined the Resistance, serving with the Armée Secrète and fighting in the Vercors mountains under the nom de guerre "Charles Dermat". He was seriously wounded in action and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his part in the fighting. He was still a teenager when the war ended.
After the Liberation he committed to the stage, studying under Charles Dullin, one of the great acting teachers of the era, until 1945. The discipline Dullin demanded, and the intensity Denner brought to it, would define everything that followed.
The stage: Dullin, Vilar and the TNP
Denner spent roughly a decade in the theatre before cinema noticed him, and by his own account the stage remained his first love for the rest of his life. He performed in Jean Vilar's productions of Shakespeare's Richard II and Corneille's Le Cid at the Avignon Festival in 1949, and Vilar, impressed by Denner's work in Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias, later brought him into the company of the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP).
The TNP of the early 1950s was one of the most remarkable acting companies in Europe. Alongside Denner were Gérard Philipe, Jeanne Moreau, Philippe Noiret, Michel Galabru and François Périer, many of them future stars of the New Wave. Denner's stage work there and afterwards included:
- Kleist's The Prince of Homburg and Musset's Lorenzaccio (1952) at the TNP
- Brecht's Mother Courage (1951) and Drums in the Night
- Molière's L'Avare (1952) and Les Fourberies de Scapin
- Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Vilar, the performance that caught Claude Chabrol's eye and led directly to Landru
- Camus's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed at the Théâtre Antoine (1959)
- Shakespeare's King Lear at the Théâtre de Chaillot (1967)
While Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol were remaking French cinema in the late 1950s, Denner was largely absent from the screen, concentrating on the theatre. When he returned it was not in a bit part but in a lead.
A film career, year by year
Denner's screen career began with small parts for established directors and grew into a run of leading and character roles for almost every major French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s.
- 1955
La Meilleure Part (The Best Part)
Yves Allégret gave Denner a small role opposite Gérard Philipe, playing an engineer losing both his job and his grip on reality. It was Denner's first real introduction to cinema audiences.
- 1958
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows)
In Louis Malle's celebrated debut thriller, Denner played the assistant to Lino Ventura's police inspector, alongside his old TNP colleague Jeanne Moreau. The film's 2005 American re-release introduced Denner to a new generation of viewers.
- 1963
Landru
Claude Chabrol offered Denner his first leading role as Henri Désiré Landru, the real-life Bluebeard who murdered a string of women during the First World War. With a shaved head and a full beard, Denner played opposite Danielle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan in a script co-written by Françoise Sagan. Many critics still consider it his greatest screen performance.
- 1964
La Vie à l'envers (Life Upside Down)
Alain Jessua's stylish, unsettling film cast Denner as Jacques Valin, a cheerful clerk in a Paris estate agency who gradually withdraws from the world. No other role let Denner reach so deeply inward, and it remains one of the most personal performances of his career.
Denner as Jacques Valin in Life Upside Down, Alain Jessua's study of a man quietly stepping out of his own life. - 1965
Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders)
Costa-Gavras's first feature, an all-star murder mystery with Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Denner played one of the dead woman's lovers, a sarcastic man with no love for the police. The same year he appeared in Chabrol's spy spoof Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kha.
- 1967
Le Vieil Homme et l'Enfant and Le Voleur
Two very different films in one year. In Claude Berri's autobiographical The Two of Us, Denner played the father of a small Jewish boy sent to live with a gruff country gentile (Michel Simon). In Malle's turn-of-the-century The Thief of Paris, he was an ageing crime boss opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo.
- 1968
La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black)
Denner's first film for François Truffaut. He played Fergus, the painter who falls for the woman (Jeanne Moreau) who has come to kill him, in Truffaut's Hitchcock-inspired revenge story adapted from Cornell Woolrich.
- 1969
Z
A supporting role as Manuel in Costa-Gavras's political thriller, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and became one of the most widely seen French-language films of the decade.
- 1970s
Lelouch, Sautet, Verneuil and Truffaut
Claude Lelouch cast Denner repeatedly, in The Crook (1970), L'Aventure c'est l'aventure (1972), And Now My Love (1974) and Robert et Robert (1978). He worked with Claude Sautet on Mado (1976), with Henri Verneuil on Fear Over the City (1975), and returned to Truffaut for Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1972) before the role that defined him for international audiences in 1977.
- 1986
Golden Eighties
Chantal Akerman's shopping-mall musical was Denner's final feature film. Illness had already slowed his output through the early 1980s, after Verneuil's A Thousand Billion Dollars (1982).
Directed by François Truffaut, 1977
The Man Who Loved Women
L'Homme qui aimait les femmes is the film that made Charles Denner's name in the United States, and the role Truffaut wrote with him in mind. Denner plays Bertrand Morane, a comfortably-off engineer in Montpellier whose entire existence is organised around women.
The film opens at Morane's funeral, attended only by women, and then works backwards. A single glimpse of a pair of legs in black stockings is enough to send Bertrand on a long, tender, slightly absurd pursuit. He is not a predator and never believes he is doing anyone harm. He simply adores women, all of them, and cannot stop looking. Late in the film he tries to make sense of his life by writing a memoir of his affairs, and the book becomes a reckoning with his failures to find any lasting stability.
Truffaut keeps the tone swift and light, and the ironic humour never tips into cruelty. As with all his romantic comedies, what looks sugary on the surface is cover for something more searching: a meditation on desire, on Truffaut himself, and on the act of turning a life into a story. Denner carries it. His Bertrand is charming, wounded, innocent and impossible to dislike.
- Original title
- L'Homme qui aimait les femmes
- Director
- François Truffaut
- Charles Denner as
- Bertrand Morane
- Released
- 1977, France
- Remake
- 1983, directed by Blake Edwards, starring Burt Reynolds and Julie Andrews
Working with François Truffaut
Truffaut cast Denner three times over nine years, and each role played to a different side of him. Together they form a small portrait of the actor's range:
- The Bride Wore Black (1968) as Fergus, the painter undone by his own model
- Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1972) as Arthur, the pious exterminator
- The Man Who Loved Women (1977) as Bertrand Morane, the title role
Truffaut admired Denner's instinct for playing men who were sincere and slightly ridiculous at once, without ever asking the audience to laugh at them. Bertrand Morane is the purest expression of that gift.
Selected filmography
| Year | Film | Director | Denner's role |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1955 | La Meilleure Part (The Best Part) | Yves Allégret | Supporting role |
| 1958 | Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) | Louis Malle | Inspector's assistant |
| 1963 | Landru | Claude Chabrol | Henri Désiré Landru (lead) |
| 1964 | La Vie à l'envers (Life Upside Down) | Alain Jessua | Jacques Valin (lead) |
| 1965 | Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders) | Costa-Gavras | Bob |
| 1965 | Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kha | Claude Chabrol | Supporting role |
| 1967 | Le Vieil Homme et l'Enfant (The Two of Us) | Claude Berri | The boy's father |
| 1967 | Le Voleur (The Thief of Paris) | Louis Malle | Cannonier |
| 1968 | La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) | François Truffaut | Fergus |
| 1969 | Z | Costa-Gavras | Manuel |
| 1970 | Le Voyou (The Crook) | Claude Lelouch | Supporting role |
| 1972 | L'Aventure c'est l'aventure | Claude Lelouch | Simon Duroc |
| 1972 | Une belle fille comme moi (Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me) | François Truffaut | Arthur |
| 1974 | Toute une vie (And Now My Love) | Claude Lelouch | Supporting role |
| 1975 | Peur sur la ville (Fear Over the City) | Henri Verneuil | Pierre Valdeck |
| 1976 | Mado | Claude Sautet | Supporting role |
| 1977 | L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women) | François Truffaut | Bertrand Morane (lead) |
| 1978 | Robert et Robert | Claude Lelouch | Robert Goldman (lead) |
| 1982 | Mille milliards de dollars (A Thousand Billion Dollars) | Henri Verneuil | Supporting role |
| 1986 | Golden Eighties | Chantal Akerman | Monsieur Schwartz (final film) |
Titles in italics are the original French release names, with the English release title in brackets where one exists. This list covers the films most widely seen outside France and is not a complete filmography.
Death and legacy
Charles Denner died on Sunday 10 September 1995 at a hospital near his home in Dreux, in the Eure-et-Loir, west of Paris. He was 69. No official cause of death was announced, but he had been living with lung cancer for more than a decade, and the illness had already curtailed his screen work through the 1980s.
Obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic returned to the same description: a thin man with bushy eyebrows, dark hair and a voice you knew in a single line. His speciality was the introspective outsider, the man who regarded distrust of the world as elementary common sense. Yet he was also a fine comic actor, able to find humour in the small accidents of everyday life, and it was that combination that Truffaut and Lelouch drew on so often.
His legacy today rests on three pillars: the ferocity of Landru, the inward journey of Life Upside Down, and the wounded charm of The Man Who Loved Women. Between them they show why, in a career that began at 19 and ended only with his death, Denner was trusted by nearly every important director in postwar French cinema.
Sources and further reading
- Charles Denner, Wikipedia (English)
- Charles Denner, Wikipédia (French), including his Resistance service under the name Charles Dermat
- Charles Denner: biography, life and films, Films de France
Questions and answers about Charles Denner
Who was Charles Denner?
Charles Denner (1926 to 1995) was a French actor of Polish-Jewish birth who worked on stage with Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire and on screen with Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, Costa-Gavras, Claude Lelouch and François Truffaut. He is best remembered for the title roles in Chabrol's Landru (1963) and Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women (1977).
When and where was Charles Denner born?
He was born on 29 May 1926 in Tarnów, in south-eastern Poland, to a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family. The family emigrated to France in 1930, when he was four years old, and he grew up in Paris.
What is Charles Denner best known for?
Internationally, for playing Bertrand Morane in François Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women (1977). In France he is equally admired for his first leading role as the wife-murderer Henri Désiré Landru in Claude Chabrol's Landru (1963), and for Alain Jessua's Life Upside Down (1964).
Did Charles Denner fight in the French Resistance?
Yes. As a teenager during the German occupation, Denner and his brother Alfred joined the Armée Secrète and fought in the Vercors under the alias "Charles Dermat". He was seriously wounded and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
Which directors did Charles Denner work with?
Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows, The Thief of Paris), Claude Chabrol (Landru), Costa-Gavras (The Sleeping Car Murders, Z), Claude Berri (The Two of Us), Claude Lelouch (The Crook, Robert et Robert and others), Claude Sautet (Mado), Henri Verneuil (Fear Over the City), Chantal Akerman (Golden Eighties) and François Truffaut, who cast him three times.
What was Charles Denner's first leading role?
Claude Chabrol's Landru in 1963. Chabrol had seen Denner on stage in Vilar's production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and cast him as the real-life French serial killer. Denner shaved his head and grew a full beard for the part.
How did Charles Denner die?
He died on 10 September 1995 at a hospital near his home in Dreux, France, at the age of 69. No cause of death was announced publicly, but he had been living with lung cancer for more than ten years.
Was The Man Who Loved Women remade?
Yes. Blake Edwards directed an American remake in 1983 with Burt Reynolds in Denner's role and Julie Andrews as his psychiatrist. Truffaut's 1977 original, with Denner, is generally regarded as the better film.
Why is Charles Denner on All Things Denner?
All Things Denner documents the people, places and history of the Denner surname worldwide. Charles Denner is one of the most accomplished people to carry the name, and his family's story, from Jewish Tarnów to wartime France, reflects one of the many paths the Denner name has travelled. Meet more notable Denners on the People page.
More notable people who share the Denner name
Charles Denner is one of nineteen Denners profiled in this archive. None of the three below is known to be related to him, or to each other. They are gathered here because they carried the same name into very different worlds.
Johann Christoph Denner
The Baroque woodwind maker credited with inventing the clarinet around 1700 by adding a speaker key to the chalumeau. Sixty-eight instruments still bear the Denner name.
Read how Johann invented the clarinet
Ernst Nicholas Denner
A German immigrant who published German-language newspapers in Kansas and Oklahoma for four decades and refused to stop printing in German during the First World War.
Read Ernst's immigrant story
Alex Denner
Activist investor and founder of Sarissa Capital Management, named among the most influential people in biopharma for his work turning around life sciences companies.
Read about Alex and Sarissa CapitalDo you have a Denner story to add?
If you have family records, photographs or memories connected to Charles Denner, the Denners of Tarnów, or any branch of the Denner name, we would like to hear from you. Every contribution helps build a fuller history of the name.
