Jacques Tati mimed the tennis player, the racquet and the ball at once
Before Monsieur Hulot shuffled onto screens with his raincoat and pipe, Jacques Tati was a picture framer's apprentice who amused rugby teammates by impersonating them. He turned that knack into wordless sporting sketches so inventive that the writer Colette called him a centaur, horse and rider in one body, conjured without a single prop.
Born Jacques Tatischeff at Le Pecq on 9 October 1907, he came from a mix of Russian, Dutch and Italian roots. His grandfather on the Russian side was a general and military attaché in Paris; his Dutch grandfather ran a smart framing business near the Place Vendôme whose customers included Toulouse-Lautrec. Jacques left school at 16 and was trained to frame pictures, but the family trade never held him.
Playing semi-professional rugby for Racing Club de France, he discovered he could make a dressing room laugh by acting out other players' efforts. When the Depression hit France in 1931–32 he walked away from both the club and the frame shop, against his family's wishes, and built a set of physical routines called Impressions Sportives. A 1935 gala for Le Journal brought him to Colette's attention, and by 1936 he was topping the bill at Mitty Goldin's ABC Théâtre, where he stayed until war broke out.
Called back to his dragoon regiment in 1939, he fought at Sedan in May 1940, then returned to cabaret at Le Lido. In early 1946 he and Fred Orain set up Cady Films. His short L'École des facteurs won the Max Linder Prize in 1947, and the feature Jour de fête, about a village postman obsessed with American speed, became a hit after French distributors initially balked. It was meant to be France's first colour feature, but the new Thomson process could not produce prints, so audiences saw it in black and white until his daughter Sophie restored the colour version in 1995.
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), shot at Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, and André Bazin hailed it as comedy's boldest step since the Marx Brothers. Later films such as Mon Oncle and Playtime mocked consumerism and chilly modern design. Playtime flopped commercially, pushing his company Specta Films into administration.
Source: Jacques Tati
