When Jean Dujardin took the podium at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival to accept the award for Best Actor (from none other than Catherine Deneuve), he concluded by telling the audience, “Now, I’m not going to say anything else, because that seems to be working for me!”
Dapper in white bow tie and tuxedo, the 39-year-old French actor was referring to his starring role in The Artist, the black-and-white silent film that wowed jury and spectators alike. Written and directed by Michel Haznavicius and costarring Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, and James Cromwell, the film, opening this Friday, is set in the 1920s and follows the fate of a silent-film star who must confront the advent of talkies. With the glamour of Errol Flynn and a joie de vivre that pulses off the screen, Dujardin gives the movie—part Singin’ in the Rain, part Sunset Boulevard—a spark all its own. “When one is happy, it shows,” he tells me over the phone from the Toronto Film Festival. “I tried to have fun with references to Gene Kelly or Douglas [which he pronounces, dramatically, DOOG-lass] Fairbanks.”
Expressing himself without words comes naturally to the actor, who grew up in Paris wanting to be an illustrator. “I spoke very little as a child, so everything I saw I put on paper. I loved telling stories on the page,” he says. “Now I do that on the screen.” In France, Dujardin has been a national treasure since the launch of his career in the late 1990s on the sitcom Un Gars, Une Fille (in which he starred with his now wife, Alexandra Lamy), and drew special raves for his lead performance in the 2009 spy spoof OSS 117—Lost in Rio, also directed by Haznavicius. Though Dujardin is often compared to the French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo by the press, his director will have none of it: “He is not Jean-Paul Belmondo, he is Jean Dujardin.”
Click here to read “The Sound of Silence:HugoandThe Artist.”