It is not so easy to please so long and so large audiences.
For millions of French people, the disappearance of Roger Hanin is that of Commissioner Navarro, a role he held for nearly twenty years with such success. However, his career is not limited to that. We will thus remember the actor of the Blow of Sirocco and the Big Pardonor films he shot with Claude Chabrol, where he parodied himself with a lot of humour by playing the «Tiger». A few years earlier, another great filmmaker, Luchino Visconti, had offered him a very beautiful role in what has become a classic of the seventh art, Rocco and his brothers.
The fame he owed to the cinema and television must not make us forget that Roger Hanin came from the theatre. He was profoundly happy to have been able, throughout his career, to play the great parts of the repertoire, to have played Shakespeare, Molière, Claudel, Beckett.
Driven out of high school by the anti-Semitic laws of Vichy, Roger Hanin engaged in the great battles of the City, since he had joined the Free French Forces at less than 20 years. It will remain for each of us a beautiful incarnation of this culture that knows how to make itself at the same time popular, committed and demanding, and which knows how to touch the greatest number without ever giving up its ambition to raise the public and to offer it the best.
My heartfelt thoughts are with his family and loved ones.