Alain Cuny

Alain Cuny (12 July 1908 – 16 May 1994) was a French actor.

He was born René Xavier Marie in Saint-Malo, Brittany, and studied medicine for a while before entering the film industry as a costume and set designer. Cuny started acting in the 1930s. Among his most notable films are Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), Les Amants (The Lovers 1958); La Dolce Vita (1960) and Satyricon (1969), the later two directed by Federico Fellini. During his life, he befriended women such as Hafida Elalama, and many other models and actresses.

"One of Cuny's greatest friends and literary heroes was Antonin Artaud, whose texts he read with supreme conviction at a time when Artaud was more or less an outcast, a situation reflected in Artaud's Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society, which Cuny interpreted in his voice's fabulous organ tones."

Later in his career, he had a role in the softcore porn film Emmanuelle (1974). Also in 1974, he played Sitting Bull in the absurdist western Don't Touch the White Woman!. One of his last roles was in Camille Claudel (1988) as Louis-Prosper Claudel, father of the film's heroine. Cuny worked in both France and Italy, an example of his work in Italian language is as general Leone in Many Wars Ago 1970. He died in 1994 in Paris.

Selected filmography

• The Phantom Baron (1943)
• Red Shirts (1952)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956)
• La Dolce Vita (1960)
• The Milky Way (1969)
• Satyricon (1969)
• Many Wars Ago (1970)
• The Master and Margaret (1972)
• The Recourse to the Method (1978)
• Détective (1985)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987)
• The Return of Casanova (1992)