Legendary French actor withdraws from festival that includes his daughter's killer

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The veteran French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant has withdrawn from this summer's Avignon Festival because he cannot bear to appear at the same venue as his daughter's killer.

In an interview published Thursday in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, Trintignant said he hates French rock musician Bertrand Cantat, convicted of manslaughter in the death of actor Marie Trintignant in 2003, more than anyone in the world. Trintignant, 80, is withdrawing from the July festival, where he was slated to perform his one-man show of French poetry, because Cantat will be appearing there in an adaptation of three of/Sophocles's plays about women staged by the Quebec director Wajdi Mouawad.

"I don't understand this man. I don't understand how he can appear at Avignon," Trintignant told the Figaro, apologizing for the strength of his feelings. "I used to find him likeable but he has been incapable of taking responsibility for anything since Marie's death ... Why can't people understand that there is something terrible in the way he is coming back as though nothing had happened."

Cantat was convicted of manslaughter after he subjected his 41-year-old girlfriend to a violent beating in a Lithuanian hotel room in 2003. She died a few days later. He served half of an eight-year sentence and was paroled in 2007.

Mouawad's show is also scheduled to play at Montreal's Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in 2012, but it looks unlikely that Cantat will be allowed into Canada to perform. Federal and Quebec politicians of all stripes, including Conservative cabinet minister Josée Verner, have rejected the idea of giving him the minister's permit that would be needed to let a convicted criminal into Canada. The TNM says it is considering its position and will make a statement soon.

Trintignant pointed out how seriously Canada takes Cantat's crime, noting it would carry a life sentence here - life imprisonment is the maximum sentence for manslaughter in Canada - and that the question of letting him into the country was raised in Quebec's Assemblée Nationale this week.