Jacques Nolot (; born 31 August 1943) is a French actor, screenwriter and film director.
At age nineteen, he met Roland Barthes, who was more than twenty years his senior. They became lovers. Barthes introduced him to Parisian intellectuals among them André Téchiné. In the 1980s and 1990s Nolot took small roles in some of Téchiné's films beginning with Hotel America (1981). He performed in many other films including Long Live Life (1984), Scene of the Crime (1986), Les Innocents (1987) or Nénette and Boni (1996). As an actor, he is best remembered for his role as Charlotte Rampling's lover in François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000).
Nolot recounted his restless youth in his unpublished novel The First Step, ( Le Premier pas). Nolot and Téchiné converted the story in the screenplay for Téchiné's 1991 film, I don't kiss (J'embrasse pas). Since then Nolot has written stories with strong auto biographic elements. His first play, La matiouette ou l'arrière-pays, grew up out of a night of improvisation with two friends that was recorded on an audio cassette and then transcribed by hand. It was adapted to the screen by Téchiné in 1983.
In 1986, Nolot wrote, directed, and acted in the short film Manège that would be the genesis for his later feature film Porn Theater (2002). He wrote and starred in a second short: Le café des Jules (1989), directed by Paul Vecchiali.
Nolot made his first feature film Hinterland (1998) LArriere pays, the film written by Nolot, was initially going to be directed by Claire Denis, but when the project with Denis fell through, he took the direction of the film's original title translate as the Back Country and makes reference to Nolot's rural village where he grew up. The plot follows the story of a man who returns to his rural hometown for the final hour of his mother's life and her subsequent funeral. Coming back as a city man, he is a stranger to both his father, who always relied on his bastard son's money without wanting to know where it came from, and his brother, a macho womanizer. Hinterland won the First Film Special Distinction Award at the Montreal World Film Festival and a FIPRESCI Special Mention Award at the Venice Film Festival both in 1998. Nolot earned a nomination for Best New Director of a Feature Film at the César Awards in 1999.
In 2000 while working in Benoît Graffin's Café de la plage (2001), the actor had a heart attack and fell into coma. He finished the film after his complete recovery. Nolot's second film Porn theater chatte à deux têtes was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. La chatte à deux tête (2002), shot entirely in a Paris movie theater was critically well received. In his third film Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie) Nolot portrays an aging HIV positive, a hustler in his youth who now in a reversal of roles has to pay for sex.
|
|