Actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of postwar French cinema's biggest stars, whose charismatic smile illuminated the screen for half a century, has died aged 88 in his Paris home,
France 24 reports.
With his devil-may-care charm, Belmondo was the poster boy of the New Wave, France's James Dean and Humphrey Bogart rolled into one irresistible man.
With his boxer's physique and broken nose, his restless insouciance chimed with the mould-breaking French cinema of the 1960s.
Director Jean-Luc Godard, the New Wave's brilliant enfant terrible, cast Belmondo in his breakout role as a doomed thug who falls in love with Jean Seberg's pixie-like American in Paris in "Breathless" (1960).
The film floored critics and audiences worldwide and, with François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows", changed the history of cinema.
Time magazine in 1964 declared Belmondo the face of modern France.
"The Tricolour, a snifter of cognac, a flaring hem – these have been demoted to secondary symbols of France," it said.
"The primary symbol is an image of a young man slouching in a cafe chair ... he is Jean-Paul Belmondo – the natural son of the Existentialist conception, standing for everything and nothing at 738 mph."
