Jean-Paul Charles Belmondo was a French actor. Initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s, he was a major French film star for several decades from the 1960s onward. His best known credits include
Breathless (1960),
That Man from Rio (1964),
Pierrot le Fou (1965),
Borsalino (1970), and
The Professional (1981). He was most notable for portraying police officers in action thriller films and became known for his unwillingness to appear in English-language films, despite being heavily courted by Hollywood. An undisputed box-office champion like Louis de Funès and Alain Delon of the same period, Belmondo attracted nearly 160 million spectators in his 50-year career. Between 1969 and 1982, he played four times in the most popular films of the year in France:
The Brain (1969),
Fear Over the City (1975),
Animal (1977),
Ace of Aces (1982), being surpassed on this point only by Louis de Funès. The popularity of Jean-Paul Belmondo as actor is mainly due to the characters he interpreted in his movies, loving to highlight the viril man, fighter, but also brave and heroic, which appealed to a wide audience in France but also abroad.