François Chaumette

Very effective as the villain of the piece, the faithless Philippe de Gonzague, in André Hunebelle’s entertaining version of Paul Féval’s ‘Le Bossu’ (1959), François Chaumette worked wonders with his cruel look, his predatory smile and his coldly threatening manner. Unfortunately this brilliant thespian did not often appear on the big screen afterward. Indeed after making the respectable number of eleven films between 1957 and 1961, he would only appear in sixteen others until his death from cancer in 1996, among which shorts, unreleased feature films and one segment of ‘Parano’ in 1994. In spite of everything, François Chaumette did manage to land a few interesting roles in works by Robbe Grillet, Sautet and Zulawski. The reason why Chaumette worked so little for the cinema is simply due to the success he met at the theater in a long career that spanned five decades, from 1943 when he debuted in Giraudoux’s ‘Sodome et Gomorrhe’ until his demise. He was also a fixture of French television where he appeared in filmed plays, serials, TV movies and historical dramas, including Claude Barma’s famous series ‘Belphégor’ in which he shone as the arch villain (what else?) Boris Williams.