Michel Cordes, who embodied a central character in the emblematic series Plus belle la vie, died at the age of 77 on Friday May 5, by firearm in the suburbs of Montpellier, we learned from a source close to the ‘investigation.

The actor, who played the boss of Le Mistral café in the cult soap opera in France, which stopped at the end of 2022, was found at his home in the afternoon, added this source, confirming a information from the regional daily newspaper Midi Libre.

The Montpellier prosecutor’s office, which could not be reached immediately, opened an investigation entrusted to the gendarmerie to determine the causes of death, the trail of suicide not being excluded, according to the source close to the investigation. .

Plus belle la vie is the longest soap opera ever produced in France, originally broadcast on France 3 and now rebroadcast on YouTube. The series, shot in the fictional Marseille district of Mistral, was stopped by France Télévisions in November 2022. It was able to attract up to six million viewers per evening.

“A simple and sincere man”

Michel Cordes, who was born on October 20, 1945 in the Hérault, played, for eighteen years in Plus belle la vie, Roland, the boss of the bar Le Mistral, where many stories of this series were tied.

Before his fictional death in the series, on the Place du Mistral, the actors of Plus belle la vie had sent him public messages, praising “a very handsome actor but above all a simple and sincere man”, as well as his “benevolence”.

Michel Cordes had also played secondary roles in films such as The Hussard on the Roof, by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, alongside Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez (1995), or in A Matter of Taste (2000), by Bernard Rapp, with Bernard Giraudeau.

He had also had a long career in the theater, as an actor but also as a director. A fervent defender of Occitan, he had suffered from the contempt of some for his accent.

“France is so made that as soon as you hear a southern accent, fools laugh. I’ve traveled a lot and I can tell you: as soon as you have the accent, people laugh. A bit like politicians when they want to denigrate you or belittle you to dominate you, ”he confided to the Gazette de Montpellier in 2017.

But in addition to the stage, the man had learned the trade of cabinetmaker and was also a sculptor.