Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#90700
of 909177 performers
Top 10%
Jean-Louis Richard represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 62 years in, and Jean-Louis is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Jean-Louis Richard appears in 4 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Jean-Louis. Breathless is the clearest case: a film rated 7.3 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are quiet performance, emotional range, drama. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for documentary, romance, war. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Louis Richard helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
Breathless (1960) as A Journalist (uncredited) · Jules and Jim (1962) as Client dans Café · The Last Metro (1980) as Daxiat
Career snapshot
Ranked #90700 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
4
1960–2022
Career length
62 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.3
Breathless
Average Nutevio score
7.0
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
8.2
Belmondo: The Incorrigible
Most frequent director
François Truffaut
2 films together
Longest collaboration
2×
With François Truffaut
Most common genre
Romance
3 titles
Average runtime
1h 46m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
7.0
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
7.1
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
1960s
7.3 average MV
The 1960s are where the work and the material meet. Jules and Jim, Breathless — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
1960s
7.3
Across 2 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2020s
8.2
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1960s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Jules and Jim, Breathless.
Most productive era
1960s
2 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 1960s | 1980s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | 7.32 films | 6.91 film | — |
| Crime | 7.31 film | — | — |
| Romance | 7.32 films | 6.91 film | — |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio · Highest rated performance · Career peak
1960Breathless
Where our catalogue meets this career, as A Journalist (uncredited). 7.3 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Most recent film
2022Belmondo: The Incorrigible
The current state of the argument.
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
4 of 4 films
as A Journalist (uncredited)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
as Daxiat
Directed by François Truffaut
as Client dans Café
Directed by François Truffaut
Directed by Unknown
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
A Journalist (uncredited)
Breathless (1960)
Performance score7.2
The performance the rest of the career is read through. A Journalist (uncredited) gives Jean-Louis Richard a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Daxiat
The Last Metro (1980)
Performance score7.1
The Last Metro asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Daxiat is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Client dans Café
Jules and Jim (1962)
Performance score7.1
Jules and Jim asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Client dans Café is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Belmondo: The Incorrigible
Belmondo: The Incorrigible (2022)
Performance score6.6
Belmondo: The Incorrigible asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. The role is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as A Journalist (uncredited)
Start here. Breathless is the clearest statement of what Jean-Louis Richard does — accessible, 90 minutes, and rated 7.3 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Jean-Louis at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
Jules and Jim (1962)
Keeps the romance register of Breathless but asks for a colder reading of it.
The Last Metro (1980)
Same director as Jules and Jim, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
Belmondo: The Incorrigible (2022)
A deliberate change of key after The Last Metro — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
François Truffaut
Director
2 films together · 7.1 avg MV
A working relationship rather than a booking — 2 films, and the register shifts each time.
Best film together
Jules and JimJean-Luc Godard
Director
1 film together · 7.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
BreathlessSix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
The Last Metro
as Daxiat
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
Jules and Jim
as Client dans Café
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Breathless
as A Journalist (uncredited)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Belmondo: The Incorrigible
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Breathless
as A Journalist (uncredited)
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. Jean-Louis Richard has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Career Achievement
Awarded
62 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
Romance Legend
Awarded
3 catalogue titles in romance, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
Breathless
as A Journalist (uncredited)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Breathless
as A Journalist (uncredited)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Jules and Jim
as Client dans Café
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Breathless
as A Journalist (uncredited)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Breathless
as A Journalist (uncredited)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Jules and Jim
as Client dans Café
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Jules and Jim
as Client dans Café
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Breathless
as A Journalist (uncredited)
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
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Have your say
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Reference
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