The French actor Jean Martin, who died on February 2 at the age of 86, had a distinguished career in the theater, where he appeared in the original productions of two of Samuel Beckett's plays, Waiting for Godot (as Lucky) and Endgame (as Clov). He also served with the French Resistance during World War II. In movies, though, he was one of those people who achieved immortality largely through his performance in a single role, that of Colonel Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo's great political film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Martin was the only professional actor in that movie's cast. Compared to the actors playing Algerian revolutionaries, his role was stylized and trickily conceived: he represented the face of the oppressive French colonial government, yet he was also the director's mouthpiece, explaining the film's view of guerrilla insurrection to the audience in speeches that made it clear that, however the action of the film migh turn out, he knew that he was playing a losing game. Eventually "the people" would emerge victorious; all he could do was postpone the inevitable. Martin delivered a remarkable performance, supplying a theatrical, instructional element to the movie without violating its documentary-style texture. (He might have been hired as much for his politics as for his talent; the actor was a commmitted leftist who, despite his heroic military background with the Resistance as an paratrooper in Indochina, was blackballed as punishment for having signed a petition protesting the French presence in Algeria.)
Martin would remain better known for his stage work than his movies, but The Battle of Algiers assured him of continued employment in European TV and films, often typecast as a villain. His most notable credits include Jacques Rivette's The Nun (1966), Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn (1970), Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973), the Sergio Leone-produced Western My Name Is Nobody (1974), Otto Preminger's Rosebud, and Roberto Rossellini's Jesus movie Il Messia (1975), in which he played Pontius Pilate. Legend has it that when he and Pontecorvo argued on the set of Algiers, the director was known to complain, "Just because he was in Godot doesn't mean he's a good actor." He was, though.