6, September 2021
Iconic French New Wave actor Jean-Paul Belmondo dies aged 88 0
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s battered face, laconic style and roguish smile captured the imagination of French 1960s youth.
Belmondo, who has died at his Paris home aged 88, was the cool rebel of the new wave of French cinema typified in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film classic, A Bout de Souffle.
His moody performance as a doomed thief and Humphrey Bogart fan struck a chord and saw him dubbed the Gallic James Dean.
Later, he forsook arts cinema to become a highly bankable commercial actor, as at home in comedy as in drama.
Jean-Paul Belmondo was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris on 9 Apr 1933, the son of Paul Belmondo, a sculptor whose statues grace many a Parisian park.
The intensely Bohemian atmosphere of his upbringing had a formative effect on him.
He failed at school and became an amateur boxer. In his short-lived career, he won 15 of his 23 bouts before giving up to concentrate on acting.
His trademark bumpy nose, however, was a result of a fight in the school playground rather than the ring.
After performing on stage in provincial theatres, his movie break came with the role of Laszlo in Marcel Carné’s 1958 film Les Tricheurs.
On the strength of his forceful portrayal, he was given his first starring role in A Bout de Souffle.
One critic described him as “a bewitchingly ugly man.”
His cult image carried him through several action films such as Les Distractions and La Novice.
Flying grandpa
Determined not to be stereotyped, Belmondo also accepted more demanding roles such as the idealistic intellectual of Vittorio de Sica’s La Ciocara in 1961, and as the young country priest in Philippe de Broca’s swashbuckling Cartouche the following year.
He also enjoyed comic roles, in Godard’s Une Femme est une Femme, and, particularly, in De Broca’s L’Homme de Rio, in which he played a suave, unflappable secret agent.
By the mid-60s, he had switched completely to the commercial mainstream and formed his own production company, Cerito.
He even performed his own stunts in such films as Les Tribulations d’Un Chinois en Chine in 1965, though he gave this practice up after an accident in the 1985 film Hold-up.
He brightened many an all-star cast in international productions such as Is Paris Burning? (1966), the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) and with Alain Delon in the gangster movie Borsalino (1970),
He moved away from action movies claiming that “I don’t want to be a flying grandpa of the French cinema.”
In 1987 Belmondo returned to the stage for the first time for nearly 30 years and divided his work between theatre and film for the rest of his career.
Two years later he won a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for his performance in Itineraire d’un Enfant Gate.
He branched out creatively as part of the ensemble in Varda’s homage to international cinema Les Cent et une Nuits de Samon Cinema in 1995 and as the Jean Valjean figure in Claude Lelouche’s re-working of Les Miserables in the same year.
Jean-Paul Belmondo was divorced from his first wife Elodie in 1965. His second marriage to Constantin also failed. He later had long relationships with actresses Ursula Andress and Laura Antonelli.
Cinema audiences at home and abroad were drawn to his charm and seeming disregard for whatever absurdities were taking place on screen. He was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history.
Culled from BBC
7, September 2021
Africa Covid death toll tops 200,000 0
More than 200,000 people have died from Covid-19 in Africa since the start of the pandemic, according to an AFP tally compiled from official records as of 1700 GMT.
A total of 200,254 fatalities have been registered in Africa, home to more than 1.3 billion people, since the virus emerged in China in December 2019.
After several deadly months, including some 27,000 deaths in July and 26,000 in August, the pandemic appears to be easing on the continent, with current daily figures of 617 compared to up to 990 in late July, a record for the region.
The figures are based on tolls communicated daily day by health authorities in each country or by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) and include the countries of North Africa.
The WHO has said that if excess deaths directly or indirectly linked to Covid are taken into account, the real toll could be double or triple.
The total number of infections is also likely to be an under-estimate, given insufficient testing capacity in Africa.
“It’s probably a lot higher than that,” said researcher Glenda Davidson of South Africa’s Cape Peninsula University of Technology. “Testing resources are very low on the continent.”
Death registration processes were often delayed and inaccurate, she added.
The current fall in the continent’s tally is a result of sharp drops in the hardest-hit countries.
South Africa has recorded 83,899 deaths so far. But last week’s daily average of 7,400 new cases and 234 deaths is significantly lower than in late July, when the daily average was up to 20,000 new cases and 420 deaths.
– Vaccination key –
The decrease has been even more striking in Tunisia, which has recorded a daily average of 1,680 cases and 64 deaths: 41 and 39 percent down on the previous week.
The figures are well below those of July, which were described by the government as “catastrophic”, with up to 7,900 cases and 207 deaths daily.
Tunisia’s summer was also marked by a sharp acceleration in its vaccination drive, with nearly 37 percent of the population having received at least one dose, compared to just 11 percent on July 1.
Africa has seen the lowest vaccination rate to date of all the continents, with only eight jabs administered per 100 inhabitants administered, according to an AFP count, compared with 102 in Europe and 116 in the United States and Canada.
According to the WHO, around three percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population are fully vaccinated. By comparison, 52 percent of people are fully vaccinated in the United States of America and 57 percent in the European Union.
“The inequity is deeply disturbing. Just two percent of the over five billion doses given globally have been administered in Africa,” WHO Africa chief Dr Matshidiso Moeti said last week.
However, inoculation in South Africa has been picking up after a rocky start.
“The vaccine has been our weapon,” said South African public health practitioner Shakira Choonara.
“It is contributing to certain changes in trends we are beginning to see.”
Source: AFP