The 1945 movie scene that taught Stellan Skarsgård everything he ever needed to know about acting
Stellan Skarsgård has been such a consistently great actor that it is often easy to forget the totality of his career, and he credits a classic of French cinema for showing him what a great performance can do.
While Skarsgård recently earned his first Academy Award nomination for Sentimental Value and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for HBO’s Chernobyl, he has been acting for over 50 years, having got his star on the stage.
He has distinguished himself as a true cinephile as well with an obsessive knowledge of film history, which may explain why all of his sons have followed in his line of work. Given that Skarsgård is a luminary within the international film community, it should not come as a surprise that he cites many international classics as among his all-time favourites.
While he has expressed admiration for many of the films that he grew up with in his home country of Sweden, he has also made it clear he is a massive fan of French cinema, particularly the wave of releases amidst and immediately after World War II.
Unlike the French New Wave movement that began in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which tended to be more expressionistic and stylised, the French post-war dramas had a classical elegance and romanticism, which Skarsgård clearly appreciated, and among the films he loves the most is Children of Paradise, a two-part drama from director Marcel Carné that was filmed throughout the war before ultimately being released in 1945.
Set in the Paris theatrical world of the 1830s, Children of Paradise is the story of the beautiful courtesan Garance, played by Arletty, who is desired by four different men, and one of them is the mime Baptiste Deburau, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, who reveals that he is having an affair with her in the midst of a stage performance.
It’s this scene that Skarsgård found most powerful, and what he described as having inspired him to be an actor, elegantly explaining, “He’s still smiling, but his makeup cracks, and his white makeup cracks in that moment. That, in a way, is a good image of acting for me because it’s always about showing the crack, and what happens behind the makeup.”
The physicality shown by Barrault in the scene is comparable to many of the performances that Skarsgård has given, as he has portrayed varying complex characters who have had to lead double lives. It’s this total love for the craft itself that has made Skarsgård an actor who can do great work in nearly any genre, rendering his filmography quite diverse. His best work includes the crime thriller Insomnia, the character drama Good Will Hunting, the science fiction romance Melancholia, the Cold War adventure The Hunt For Red October, the neo-noir mystery The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and the Dune franchise.
Skarsgård’s love of international cinema means that he will sometimes recommend obscure and less well-known titles, but he is hardly the only fan of Children of Paradise. The film was praised by François Truffaut, one of the chief architects of the French New Wave, who claimed it was what he had always wanted to direct. In the United States, it was frequently compared to Gone with the Wind, and was described as the “best movie ever made” by none other than Marlon Brando.
