ROGER DUMAS

3 Jul

(9 May 1932 - 2 July 2016)

The French actor Roger Dumas appeared in some 150 films and TV series across sixty years. Although he was never out of work, many of his films were for home consumption only. His first film in 1954 was Wild Fruit, a family saga with Gérard Blain. He worked with Brigitte Bardot in The Bride Is Too Beautiful (1956); with Louis De Funes in Squeak-Squeak (1963); and with Belmondo and Françoise Dorléac in the action movie That Man From Rio (1964) which did get a wide release. He was directed by Claude Chabrol in An Orchid for the Tiger (1965) and also in Line of Demarcation (1966), a story of the Nazi invasion of France. From the 1960s Dumas appeared in many French TV series, including a mini-series of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1979) and Le gang des tractions (1991). He was with Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve and Philippe Noiret in Fort Saganne (1984), played Leontes in Éric Rohmer’s version of A Winter’s Tale (1992), and was Bonhomme in Jean Marboeuf’s war film Pétain (1993). Dumas carried on working on TV including a Maigret episode (1997), appeared in another version of The Count of Monte-Cristo (1998) and he was Lorrain in a mini-series of Les Misérables. The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (2008) looked at the lives of family members at the end of the 20th century, while Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert (2009) was about a conductor who was fired for employing Jewish musicians. His last film appearance was in First Growth (2015), a drama about a vineyard on the verge of bankruptcy. He had no children but was briefly married to the actress Marie-José Nat in the early 1960s.

MICHAEL DARVELL

Michael Darvell

Michael Darvell trained as a librarian at Watford and in Surrey before joining Ealing Libraries where he became Music Librarian for the borough. He edited Masthead, the magazine of the University of North London School of Librarianship, The Surrealist, the staff magazine of Surrey County Library, and contributed to the Assistant Librarian and London Librarian professional journals. A freelance film reviewer since 1970, he has written for Film, Films Illustrated, Film Review, Movie Maker and Radio Times, as well as editing Montage, the London film societies magazine, for ten years. A change of career saw him joining What’s On in London as Features Editor and he eventually stepped into the shoes of the late F. Maurice Speed (founding father of Film Review annual) as the magazine’s Editor. From 2007 to 2015, he was co-editor of the Film Review annual with Mansel Stimpson. As well as writing about films, Michael has reviewed theatre for The Stage newspaper, and has written about music theatre and cabaret for the Classical Source and Musical Theatre Review websites. He is also a former restaurant critic for the ViewLondon website. Michael has been a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle since 2005.

ROGER DUMAS

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

MICHAEL CIMINO