His career began with ten years spent acting in live theatre, playing roles drawn from works of Shakespeare,
Oscar Wilde and
Jean Anouilh. Aged already 30, he created the role of
Thomas Becket in the 1959 world premiere of Anouilh's
Becket, and held
Anouilh in veneration all his life. Later Cremer played Max in a French production of
Bent by
Martin Sherman in 1981. He regarded his basic profession as that of a stage actor, though he gravitated firmly to films. It was in 1957 that Cremer had his first credited part in a film, '' Quand la femme s'en mêle
(When a woman meddles''), which starred
Alain Delon. However, it was in 1965 that Cremer's career really began to prosper, with the film
La 317e section, (
The 317th Platoon), directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer and set in Indochina during the French colonial wars. From then onwards, Cremer became a popular actor and appeared in over 110 productions for cinema and television. While Cremer tried to avoid labels and typecasting, he tended to be offered tough-guy roles, often military men. Examples from various points in his career include
Section spéciale (1975),
La légion saute sur Kolwezi (1980) and
Là-haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages (2004).
Special Section (French original title:
Section spéciale), released in 1975, is about a kangaroo court set up in collaborationist Vichy France to ensure judicial convictions of innocent people so as to mollify the Nazis. A
French language film directed by the
Greek-French film director
Costa-Gavras, it features Cremer as
Lucien Sampaix, a Communist journalist. The 1980 film
La légion saute sur Kolwezi (English
Operation Leopard), directed by
Raoul Coutard, is a
documentary-style portrayal of a real-life operation headed by the
French Foreign Legion in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1978 to rescue foreign hostages. Cremer plays a military commander.
Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 2004 film
Là-haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages (
Above the Clouds), based on his own novel,
Là-haut. Cremer played the Colonel. Some 30 other film parts of Cremer included releases by both French and foreign directors. In 1967, for example, came the film
The Stranger (Italian:
Lo straniero), directed by Italian director
Luchino Visconti, based on the novel ''
L'Étranger'' by
Albert Camus, and starring
Marcello Mastroianni. The 1976 release
The Good and the Bad (French
Le Bon et les Méchants) was directed by
Claude Lelouch, with Cremer playing Inspector Bruno Deschamps. The next year, 1977, came the thriller
Sorcerer (French
Le Convoi de la peur), based on
Georges Arnaud’s novel
Le Salaire de la peur and directed by a
William Friedkin fresh from the successes of
The French Connection (1971) and
The Exorcist (1973). In
Sorcerer, Cremer played the fraudulent Paris banker Victor Manzon, starring alongside
Roy Scheider. In 1989 Cremer starred in
Jean-Claude Brisseau’s film drama
White Wedding (French
Noce Blanche) with
Vanessa Paradis. From 1991, he became a universally known figure in France and elsewhere for his televised portrayal of
George Simenon's Commissaire Maigret, a role he played until 2005, totalling 54 episodes. During this period his cinema film commitments were few, though he did appear in 2000 with
Charlotte Rampling in
Under the Sand, written and directed by
François Ozon, in 2001 in José Giovanni's ''Mon père, il m'a sauvé la vie
, and in 2004 in Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Là-haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages
(Above the Clouds''). In 2005, in the final episode of the
Maigret series, his voice was dubbed by that of
Vincent Grass in ''Maigret et l'Étoile du Nord'': Cremer was suffering from the throat cancer that made him decide to end his career. == Later years ==