Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli (27 December 1925 – 12 May 2020) was a French actor, producer and film director with a career spanning 70 years.

[1][2] Piccoli was born in Paris to a musical family; his French mother was a pianist and his Swiss father was a violinist from the canton of Ticino.

In 1973 he starred in Luis García Berlanga's Grandeur nature [fr] (Life Size), a controversial film that suffered censorship during the Franco era and was not released in Spain until 1978.

[3] Piccoli was part of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés circle in the 1950s, which included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

[1] A lifelong left-winger, he objected to repression in the Soviet bloc, and supported the Solidarity trade union in Poland.

[7][8] In 2001, he was awarded the IX Europe Theatre Prize, in Taormina, with the following motivation: Michel Piccoli began his career on the stage - his Don Juan remains celebrated - before crossing to the "other shore", the cinema, finally coming to accept the relativity of travelling back and forth between the two and taking full advantage of their potential interaction.

When Bondy, Brook, and Chéreau turned to him, despite his reputation as a cinema performer, it was undoubtedly because of this receptiveness and adaptability.

He was also ready to take on an unprecedented variety of roles, which took him from Schnitzler to Chekhov and Pirandello, from Shakespeare to Koltès.