Daniel Toscan du Plantier

Champion of genuinely European cinema

Daniel Toscan du Plantier, film producer and promoter: born Chambéry, France 7 April 1941; president, Unifrance 1988-2003; married first Marie-Christine Barrault (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved), second Francesca Comencini (one son; marriage dissolved), third 1991 Sophie Bouniol (died 1996), 1998 Melita Nikolic (one son, one daughter); died Berlin 11 February 2003.

Daniel Toscan du Plantier was producing Federico Fellini's La Città delle donne (City of Women) in Rome in 1979 when Ettore Manni, a major player in this rambling meditation on male sexual insufficiency and burgeoning feminism, committed suicide. Despairing of his own failing potency and maddened by Fellini's bullying direction, he had got drunk one night, donned the costume he wore in westerns such as Ringo and His Golden Pistol, and blown off his genitals with a pearl-handled six gun.

"Ah!" said Fellini triumphantly when Toscan du Plantier brought the news the next morning. "You see, the script does work!"

"Toscan", as the film industry knew him, told such stories not with a shrug and raised eyebrows but with a hoot of laughter and something like relish. "Artists!" he seemed to say. "Aren't they wonderful?"

As the British cinema has no single spokesperson, nobody to whom the press turns for comment in a cinematic crisis, or who, when the great film-maker dies, can be relied on for a graceful eulogy, the gap left in French film by the death of Toscan, president since 1988 of Unifrance, the organisation charged with promoting French cinema internationally, is difficult to quantify.

Daniel Toscan du Plantier was born in Chambéry in Savoie in 1941; he studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris and in 1969 became advertising manager at the popular daily newspaper France-Soir. From 1975, when he became director- general of the venerable Gaumont film company, Toscan's toothy grin, brushy white moustache, glinting spectacles and sweep of silver hair was a fixture of European cinema, not to mention a gift for journalists. Unrepentantly snobbish, he gloried in his cumbersomely aristocratic name, claiming to be descended from the Chevalier Bayard, the 16th-century knight famed as being "without fear and beyond reproach".

He took equal pleasure in his status as a ladies' man. His relationships with his first wife, the actress Marie-Christine Barrault, whom he married in his teens, and then, following their break-up, with Isabelle Huppert, Isabella Rossellini and numerous other glamorous stars, were the stuff of gossip magazines, as was the murder in 1996, still unsolved, of his third, estranged, wife, Sophie, at her cottage in Ireland.

Though President François Mitterand once introduced him to Bill Clinton as "the Jack Valenti of French cinema", Toscan enjoyed a much higher status than the silver-haired boss of the Motion Picture Association of America. Unlike Valenti, a career bureaucrat, Toscan plunged into working production from the moment he took over Gaumont.

Haunting the Cinecittà studios in Rome, Toscan personally chivvied Fellini into starting work on Casanova (1976), E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1980), and City of Women. He also dealt with the moody Andrei Tarkovsky on Zerkalo (Mirror, 1975) and Nostalghia (Nostalgia, 1983), coaxed Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982) into post-production, and revived Akira Kurosawa's epic Ran (1985) 10 years after Japanese producers had consigned it, and its director, to the scrap heap.

Gaumont's investment won Oscars and honours but not commensurate profits. When the company prised Toscan out of the executive suite in 1985, its losses totalled 500 million francs. Mitterrand, always a supporter and friend, said publicly on the occasion of his leaving, "You can be sure that if, as far as I'm concerned, you are not responsible for the losses, you are certainly responsible for the films."

To sweeten the divorce, Gaumont sold Toscan its Erato record division for a symbolic one franc. He moved into its cramped offices in the Marais, and formed Erato Films, from where he launched more of the productions closest to his heart: filmed operas. His success at Gaumont with Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni (1979), fluidly staged in and around Venice, prompted an equally lavish La Bohème (1988) by Luigi Comencini and a Boris Godunov (1989) by Andrei Zulawsky with more than its share of Ivan the Terrible. Later, with less success, he would back a soggy Madame Butterfly (1995), directed by Mitterrand's nephew Frédéric, and Benoît Jacquot's more successful Tosca (2001).

Filmed opera is a notorious sink of losses and Toscan's films were no exception. Urged to try more conventional projects, he perversely allied himself to the most terrible of European cinema's enfants, producing Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), and backing the irascible Maurice Pialat, with whom he made Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan, 1989) and a revisionist biography of Vincent Van Gogh in 1991.

Anyone visiting Toscan's narrow office at Erato in the early Nineties found it clogged with the fake Van Gogh canvases generated for that film, while the corridors reverberated with the latest Erato opera booming from downstairs. This was the sort of art-drenched milieu in which Toscan gloried. By then, he had been appointed head of Unifrance. Already a champion of cultural ecumenicalism, he campaigned vigorously for a genuinely European cinema, particularly in collaboration with Germany.

It is operatically appropriate that Toscan should have died at the Berlin Film Festival, where he had just launched a Franco-German film academy to encourage co- productions between the two countries, and that his death should come one month to the day after that of his friend and collaborator Pialat. It was again the stuff of opera that, reflecting on his long and intimate association with Pialat, Toscan should have recalled only a few days ago that Theo Van Gogh only outlived his brother Vincent by six months. "It will be interesting to see where I am in six months," he mused.

Toscan called his 1992 memoir Bouleversifiant. In English, "staggering" probably comes closest, but the word appears in no dictionary. And, from a man like Daniel Toscan du Plantier, one would expect no less. "He was a little like the producers from 30 or 40 years ago, who made movies because they wanted to have a kind of love adventure with films," his friend the actor Pierre Arditti said.

"They weren't doing it for business. They produced out of desire."

John Baxter