Gaston Michel

Biography

1856, France: the year and place that ushered Gaston Michel onto the world’s stage. Within two breathless seasons of silent cinema’s infancy he slipped into the shadows of Louis Feuillade’s Paris—first as the criminal mastermind’s puppet-master in Les Vampires (1915), then as the crusading banker’s father in Judex (1916), and again in The New Mission of Judex (1917), each time lending a weathered gravitas that made flickering nitrate feel almost haunted. Six years after his final fade-out, the Atlantic tides closed over him in Lisbon; 15 November 1921 became the date the camera finally stopped turning.