“The revolution is like a bicycle: when it stops moving, it falls”. This facetious reply by Claude Giraud alias Mohammed Larbi Slimane alias Rabbi Seligman, accomplice of Louis de Funès, will remain unforgettable. This actor with the warm and modulated voice, official voice of Robert Redford and Harrison Ford, died on November 3 in Auvergne where he was born 84 years ago.
A pure Auvergne product, Claude Giraud dreamed of making cinema very early on. It was while going up to Paris that he made his first meetings and his first steps as an actor in 1958 in The cheaters by Marcel Carné. A student at the Center d’art dramatique de la rue Blanche and at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art, he impressed the jury during the 1962 Conservatory exit competition. The same year he became a resident of the Comédie-Française and made his debut on television. . In the theater, he plays first Arsace, then Titus in Berenice which will take him to Broadway where he also plays Hippolyte in Phaedra.
In cinema, Claude Giraud shines in Angelique, Marquise of the Angels and his two suites created by Bernard Borderie, in which he is Philippe de Plessis-Bellières. In 1972, he left the French to follow his friend Jean-Laurent Cochet to the Théâtre Hébertot. Danielle Mathieu Bouillon, wife of Serge Bouillon, then administrator of the premises, remembers it. “I had known him in 1971, during the rehearsals of a play by Jean Anouilh at the Théâtre Antoine. He embodied Aegisthus with Francine Bergé, they were magnificent Claude was a good man with a noble and generous character; his singing voice was beautiful too and he even designed a show of poetic songs», She says.
The voice of Indiana Jones
At the same time, thanks to his stamp, he began to dub great actors. He would become the French voice of Robert Redford in about fifteen films and later that of the late Alan Rickman – Professor Snape in Harry Potter – that of Roger Moore, Sean Connery or Tommy Lee Jones.
And of courseIndiana Jones. In 1981, he lent his voice to Harrison Ford in The Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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