Claude Laydu obituary

admired player with a presence is instinctive and austere

One of the greatest spectacles in the history of the film was given by Claude Laydu in the title role in Robert Bresson's Diary of UN Country Priest (Journal of a Country Priest, 1951 ). As a young priest, sick, unable to solve the problems of his little parish, and assaulted by doubt, Laydu, who died aged 84, took his own spirituality, the presence of intense and ascetic instinct is to run. His performance prompted Jean Tulard to write in his Dictionary of Film "no other actor deserves to go to heaven as much as Laydu."

This is all the more remarkable because Bresson said that "Art is the transformation. No person may get in the way "and called on his players 'models' which was formed to eliminate any trace of theatricality and speak in a monotone. Bresson chose 23 years old, among the many candidates, all Catholics.

Born in Brussels, Laydu went to Paris to study theater at the National Academy of Dramatic Art. He was a member of the company of Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault at the Marigny Theatre, where he auditioned for Bresson. For more than a year and Laydu Bresson met every Sunday to discuss the document. To get used to the holy life, Laydu spent some time in a monastery. Fasted a lot during the shooting, which helped to give the appearance of a man suffering both physically and spiritually.

1936 novel by Georges Bernanos had seemed an unlikely subject for a film, but Bresson, with his natural, minimalist images and real places, managed to convey the loneliness and anxiety to the Interior cure by injecting it into isolation, and the literary device of the narrative in first person, talking gently Laydu. Unlike most of the discoveries of Bresson, Laydu decided to continue acting, but never returned to work with a director of the sculpture, or a film of this magnitude.

• stark contrast with his first feature film, the second Laydu, The Journey to America (United States go to 1951) was a light comedy in which supported Pierre Fresnay and Yvonne Printemps. However, an air of moral rectitude still clung to him in a series of features below. In 1952, appeared in the Casbah At Heart (heart of the Kasbah), which is haunted by an affair with his stepmother (Viviane Romance) in Assassins are all us (we are all murderers), Andre Cayatte's conviction the death penalty, in which he played the lawyer of a man condemned to death, and the road to Damascus (The Damascus road), a religious epic sword and sandals, which was chosen as the Saint-Etienne
Laydu was back in a cassock God of War (I was Pastor, 1953). Although not as bad as their previous incarnation priestly character, but has struggled to be accepted in a small mining town in Spain. Laydu then played a Russian Orthodox priest Rasputin (1954), with Pierre Brasseur, and he was the brother of a novice nun The Dialogues of the Carmelites (The Carmelites, 1960), based on another work of Bernanos.

On the side, Laydu was launched against type as corrupt and effeminate Attila Valentinian Caesar (1954) and two musical fantasy biopics, like Franz Schubert, Symphony in d'Amore (1956), Carlo Goldoni that Italienisches Capriccio (1961). In the latter case, he played opposite his wife, Christine Balli, who bore him a son and a daughter.

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