Francis Blanche

François Jean Blanche known as Francis Blanche 20 July 1921 6 July 1974 was a French actor singer humorist and author He was a very popular figure on stage radio and in films during the 1950s and 1960s His two daughters Barbara Dominique are artists with their studios in Eze Blanche was born in an artistic family mainly of stage actorsincluding his father Louis Blanche and his uncle Emmanuel Blanche who was a painter He completed his secondary schooling at fourteen the youngest in France to do so at the time In the 1940s and 1950s Blanche was part of Robert Dhérys theatrical company Les Branquignols with whom he played in the film Ah Les belles bacchantes starring Robert Dhéry Colette Brosset Dhérys thenwife and Louis de Funès directed by Jean Loubignac in 1954 Blanche teamed up with Pierre Dac to form a comic duo best remembered for Le Sâr Rabindranath Duval a sketch about a phony and nonsensical Indian clairvoyant and guru 1957 They also created a popular and equally nonsensical radiophonic series loosely based on a highly improbable espionage and conspiration plot Malheur aux barbus which was broadcast on Paris Inter in 213 episodes from 1951 to 1952 The same plot and characters were revived on Europe 1 in a series called Signé Furax enjoying no less than 1034 daily episodes between 1956 and 1960 Both broadcasts were phenomenal audience successes in the pretelevision era Blanche was also renowned for broadcasting phone pranks in which he entertained listeners by making the most improbable situations sound plausible He wrote poems and the lyrics of 673 songs On stage he acted in Tartuffe and Néron and in 1955 Chevalier du Ciel an operetta by Luis Mariano at the GaîtéLyrique theatre Blanche also enjoyed a successful cinematographic career both as an actor and scriptwriter He appeared as a hardheaded German colonel Obersturmführer Schulz opposite Brigitte Bardot in Babette sen vaten guerre 1959 He was one of the favourite actors of French filmmaker Georges Lautner and played Maître Folace a shady solicitor counselling a colourful gangster mob in Les Tontons flingueurs 1963 Blanche also appeared in Boris Vassiliefs Les Barbouzes 1964 He delighted in parodying classical music adapting famous works such as Schuberts Die Forelle The Trout into a crazy and slightly risqué piece about a 16yearold romantic girl obsessed with Schuberts song to the point of giving birth to a live trout while performing it on her piano Similarly he turned Beethovens 5th Symphony into a lengthy and quite repetitive musical glorification of the clothes peg and its fictitious inventor JérémieVictor Opdebec Blanche died at the age of 52 from a heart attack with a background of untreated Type 1 diabetes He is buried in Èze cemetery Source Article Francis Blanche from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30