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Born into showbusiness, Jean Gabin began performing at the Folies Bergères and the Moulin Rouge. Indeed, in his early days, he was known for crooning in the style of Maurice Chevalier and his first films had a decidedly musical ring. But, from the mid-1930s, he began epitomising the doomed hero in such dark poetic realist dramas as Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937),... [+]

Born into showbusiness, Jean Gabin began performing at the Folies Bergères and the Moulin Rouge. Indeed, in his early days, he was known for crooning in the style of Maurice Chevalier and his first films had a decidedly musical ring. But, from the mid-1930s, he began epitomising the doomed hero in such dark poetic realist dramas as Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937), Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine (1938) and Marcel Carné's Le Jour se Lève (1939), which established him as a barometer for French self-esteem as war with Nazi Germany became an inevitability.

Having fled to Hollywood, where he had a passionate affair with Marlene Dietrich, Gabin returned to fight with the Free French. However, despite successes like Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au Grisbi (1953), his brand of noble, proletarian masculinity became outdated and in the stage of his career he found himself essaying craggy, confident crooks and pragmatic, bourgeois humanists. [-]