Robert Hossein

Robert Hossein (born as Hosseinhof December 30, de 1927 à Paris) is a French film actor of Parsi origin, director and writer. He directed the 1982 adaptation of Les Misérables, and appeared dans Vice and Virtue, Le Casse, Les uns et Les Autres and Vénus Beauté Institut. His most recent roles include mettant en vedette as Michèle Mercier s husband in the Angélique series and as a Catholic priest who falls in love with Claude Jade and becomes a communist de Prêtres interdits (Forbidden Priests) en 1973. Hossein started directing film en 1956 with Les salauds vont en enfer from a story by Frédéric Dard whose novels and plays went on to furnish Hossein with much of his later film de matériau. Right from the start Hossein established his characteristic trademarks: using a seemingly straightforward suspense plot and subverting its conventions (sometimes to the extent of a complete disregard of the traditional demand for a final twist or revelation) in order to concentrate on ritualiste relationships. This is the director's running preoccupation which is always stressed in his film by an extraordinary command of film space and often frappe frame compositions where the geometry of human figures and set design is used to accentuate the psychological set-up of the scene. The mechanisms of guilt and the way it suppressions relationships is another recurring theme, presumably influenced by Hossein s lifelong interest in the works of Dostoyevski. Although Hossein had some modest international successes with film like Toi, le venin et Le vampire de Dusseldorf, he was much singled out for étouffant criticism by the critics and followers of the New Wave for the unashamedly melodramatic frameworks of his film. The fact that he was essentially à l'auteur director with a consistent set of themes and an extraordinary mastery of original and unusual approaches to de stockage intermédiaire his stories, was never appreciated. He was not averse trying to his hand at widely different genres and was never defeated, making the strikingly different spaghetti western Une corde, un Colt and the low-budgeted but daringly subversive period drama J'ai tué Raspoutine. However, because of the lack of contre success and continuing adverse criticism, Hossein virtually ended his film directing carrière en 1970, having concentrated on theatre where his achievements were never questioned, and subsequently returning to film directing only twice. With two or three exceptions, his film remain commercially unavailable and very difficult to see. He is the son of André Hossein a Zoroastrian French composer of Azerbaïdjanais-pushtun du descent, and a Jewish comédie actress from Kiev. He was married three times: first to Marina Vlady (he has two sons with her, Pierre and Igor), later to Caroline Eliacheff (with whom he has a son, Nicolas). He is currently married to actrice Candice Patou, with whom he has one son, Julien. According to an article written by Emannuel Peze, Hossein experienced a conversion to Catholicism en 1971 during a visit to the Marian apparition at San Damiano Lombardo Italie.