Actor best known for playing Guy Foucher in the French musical film classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The actor Nino Castelnuovo, who has died aged 84, starred in one of the indisputable masterpieces of 1960s French cinema: Jacques Demy’s heartbreaking and visually ravishing musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
Castelnuovo was tender and compelling as Guy, the handsome mechanic in love with Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), who works in her mother’s umbrella shop. Their romance is interrupted when Guy is summoned to do his military service in the Algerian war. Immediately after he breaks this news to Geneviève, the tearful couple, filmed from the waist up, are borne smoothly along the street as if on a conveyor belt. The scene suggests their trance-like state of shock while hinting at forces beyond their control.