Jean-Paul Belmondo, the French actor who reached international fame starring in Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary film Breathless at the age of 27, died on Monday according to Agence France-Presse. He continued to work until the late aughts, collaborating with many heavy hitters of international cinema like Jean-Pierre Melville, Vittorio De Sica, Agnès Varda, Peter Brook and Claude Lelouch. He was 88 years old.

The son of sculptor Paul Belmondo, Jean-Paul was born in the wealthy Paris suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. He studied theater and, in the late 1950s, after working a bit as an amateur boxer, he secured a number of small film roles, including Young Sinners directed by Marcel Carné and Sunday Encounter directed by Marc Allégret. Young film critic Jean-Luc Godard spotted him in Sunday Enounter and cast him in his short film Charlotte and Her Boyfriend. Godard’s fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic-turned-auteur Claude Chabrol poached Belmondo for his thriller A Double Tour, but later that same year Godard made the thick-lipped, flat-nosed actor his anti-hero leading man in Breathless, and changed cinema forever.

Based on a treatment by Godard, Chabrol, and François Truffaut, Breathless is a jazzy, sexy supernova of youthful vigor rooted in a love of pulp fiction, American movies, and not caring about rules. Rather than set-up dolly shots, Godard pushed his cinematographer Raoul Coutard through Paris streets in a wheelchair as he held the camera. Rather than worry about shooting traditional coverage, Godard skipped the boring parts and got to the essence of each scene using jump cuts, something mainstream moviegoers would have only seen before if the projectionist had made an error. At the center of it all, was Belmondo’s face, often under a hat, “ooz[ing] pugnacity to authority,” in the words of critic Ella Taylor.

Belmondo and Godard teamed up again for the subversive romantic-musical A Woman is a Woman and the road picture Pierrot le Fou.

Throughout his career he stuck mostly with French productions, but appeared opposite Sophia Loren in Two Women for director Vittorio De Sica and Claudia Cardinale in The Lovemakers for Mauro Bolognini. He worked through the 1970s and 1980s in action films and action-comedies, often specializing in gangsters, in hits like The Burglars, The Man From Acapulco, and Hold-Up, later remade by Bill Murray as Quick Change. He was regularly cited for doing his own stunts.

In 1995 he starred in Claude Lelouch’s three-hour Les Misérables, a film set during World War II in conversation with Victor Hugo’s novel.

An international sex symbol, Belmondo had three children with his first wife Elodie Constantin, and had longtime entanglements with Swiss film star and O.G. Bond girl Ursula Andress, Italian actress Laura Antonelli, and Brazilian performer Maria Carlos Sotto Mayor. In his mid-50s he met the 24-year-old dancer Natty Tardivel, whole he eventually married in 2002. In 2003, when Belmondo was 70, Tardivel gave birth to Belmondo's fourth child.

Cinephiles took to social media on Monday when word of his passing spread.

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