Jean YANNE

Coming from a working-class background, Jean Yanne went after high school to study journalism which he abandoned very quickly, encouraged to write sketches for the cabaret. After three years of military service, in 1957 he returned to the cabarets, started singing and in the early 1960s became a radio and television host. Beginning to get bored, he was drawn to the cinema which made him debut in 1964 in La Vie à l'Envers by Alain Jessua.
He shoots several films before really getting noticed in Week-End (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard where the director extends his image of eternal grumbling developed on the radio waves. But it is Claude Chabrol who will reveal it through the respective roles of a domestic tyrant and an assassin in two films shot in quick succession in 1969: Que la bête meure and Le Bouche...