Jean Marais

Cocteau saw it first. In 1937 Jean Marais became the lover of the poet and film director Jean Cocteau, who took him as his muse and directed him repeatedly on stage and screen. The two stayed close after the relationship ended, and Marais spent much of his later life keeping Cocteau's work in front of the public.

The collaboration produced the films that outlast everything else. In Beauty and the Beast (1946) he plays three parts, the Beast, the Prince and Avenant, acting a full performance out from under the Beast's mask and still finding the animal's shame in it. Orpheus (1950) put him at the centre of Cocteau's rewriting of the myth, a poet crossing between worlds through a mirror.

Then he became something else entirely, a commercial star. Post-war France wanted swashbucklers and Marais supplied them: Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo (1954), Rodolphe in The Mysteries of Paris (1962), costume epics like Napoleon (1955) and The Battle of Austerlitz (1960), the lodger in Visconti's White Nights (1957). The Fantomas trilogy, from 1964 to 1967, is the peak of that phase, and the credits tell you why it worked: he plays the masked criminal and the journalist chasing him, plus whatever disguise the plot requires that week.

He kept working into old age, as the King in Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin (1970), the bishop in the 1995 Les Miserables and a small part in Stealing Beauty (1996). He painted, sculpted and wrote, held an honorary Cesar, and in 1996 received the Legion of Honour for his contribution to French cinema. He lived from 1913 to 1998.