“Max Et Les Ferrailleurs” 1971 movie poster acrylic painting in progress

Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider

Michel Piccoli was born in Paris, 27 December 1925. He is a French actor and has appeared in many different roles, from seducer to cop to gangster to Pope, in more than 170 movies. Piccoli has worked with great directors and appeared in films such as Jean-Pierre Melville‘s Le Doulos (1962) with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Luc Godard’s  Le mépris (1963) with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, Claude Sautet’s Max Et Les Ferrailleurs (1971) with Romy Schneider, Claude Chabrol’s Les Noces rouges (1973), Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967) and Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974), Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1971), Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973), Alain Resnais’ La Guerre est Finie (1966) with Yves Montand and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980) with Burt Lancaster.

He has been married three times, first to Éléonore Hirt, then for eleven years to the singer Juliette Gréco and finally to Ludivine Clerc. He has one daughter from his first marriage, Anne-Cordélia. He is politically active on the left, and is vocally opposed to the Front National. Good friends with Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They all supported the communist movement, but Piccoli disapproved of the totalitarian regimes in former Eastern Europe.

Romy Schneider (23 September 1938 – 29 May 1982) was a film actress born in Vienna who held German and French citizenship. She started her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. From 1955 to 1957 she played the central character of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Austrian Sissi trilogy.

In 1958 she met Alain Delon and they became engaged. Schneider moved to France where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era. She worked with director Claude Sautet on five films. Their first collaboration, Les choses de la vie (1970) with Michel Piccoli, was a great success and made Schneider an icon in France. The three colleagues teamed up again for the film-noir thriller Max et les Ferrailleurs (1971), and she appeared with Yves Montand in Sautet’s César et Rosalie (1972). In 1975 she starred in Claude Chabrol’s thriller Innocents with Dirty Hands (Les innocents aux mains sales,) with Rod Steiger.

Her engagement to Delon ended in 1963 although they remained close lifelong friends. They continued to work together in such films as La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1968), which revitalized her career, and The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). Schneider subsequently married twice. The son from her first marriage died in an accident in 1981 when he was 14. In May 1982, aged 43, Schneider was found dead of cardiac arrest in her Paris apartment.