Gaspard Ulliel, 37, ‘Moon Knight’ and ‘Hannibal Rising’ Star, Dies Snowboarding

Gaspard Ulliel, a star of French cinema finest identified outdoors his native nation for portraying the younger Hannibal Lecter in “Hannibal Rising” and the style designer Yves Saint Laurent in “Saint Laurent,” died on Wednesday, the day after a snowboarding accident in France. He was 37.

Mr. Ulliel’s household confirmed his dying in a press release to Agence France-Presse, the French information service.

His dying, from a head damage, in keeping with the French press, got here simply weeks earlier than Mr. Ulliel is to seem in Marvel’s “Moon Knight” collection for Disney+, scheduled to debut on March 30.

Roselyne Bachelot, France’s tradition minister, was among the many many French political and cultural figures to pay tribute to him. “His sensitivity and the depth of his performing made Gaspard Ulliel an distinctive actor,” she mentioned on Twitter. “Cinema at present loses an immense expertise.”

Mr. Ulliel was born in a suburb of Paris on Nov. 25, 1984. He appeared in quite a few French TV exhibits and flicks whereas nonetheless a youngster and studied movie at a college in Paris, hoping to be a director. However he needed to drop out when his performing profession took off, he advised The New York Instances’s T Journal in 2010, although a return to directing was “nonetheless in my thoughts,” he mentioned on the time.

In the identical interview he talked of his love for snowboarding, saying: “Half my household comes from the French Alps. As a toddler, I virtually skied earlier than I walked.”

His rise to international prominence got here in 2003 together with his first main film function, in “Strayed,” enjoying an itinerant teenager serving to a lady flee Nazi-occupied Paris throughout World Warfare II. Karen Durbin, in a assessment in The Instances, mentioned he was the “scene stealer” of the movie.

“He appears absolutely arrived, displaying us the sides of a fancy and mercurial character like a blackjack vendor shuffling a deck of playing cards,” she wrote.

For the efficiency, Mr. Ulliel was nominated for a César award, France’s model of the Oscars.

He grew to become extra identified to audiences in america when he took the lead in “Hannibal Rising,” the 2007 prequel to the 1991 hit “The Silence of the Lambs,” enjoying Hannibal Lecter as an oddly sympathetic, if nonetheless horribly murderous, character. The movie acquired combined evaluations.

However he received extra unanimous reward for later movies like “Saint Laurent” (2014) and “To the Ends of the World,” a 2018 battle movie set in Vietnam. A.O. Scott, reviewing “Saint Laurent” in The Instances, mentioned that Mr. Ulliel portrayed the designer Yves Saint Laurent as having by no means experiencing a second of self-doubt all through his profession whereas “conveying a haunting, quietly charismatic combination of sensitivity and coldness.”

“Saint Laurent” introduced Mr. Ulliel a nomination for one of the best actor award on the Césars, an honor he received in 2016 for his efficiency in Xavier Dolan’s “It’s Solely the Finish of the World,” by which he performed a prizewinning author who comes dwelling to inform his household he’s dying.

Suitably for somebody who portrayed one in all vogue’s greatest idols, Mr. Ulliel moved simply within the vogue world as effectively, having appeared on the quilt of French Vogue and fronting a marketing campaign for the scent Bleu de Chanel.

No particulars on his survivors had been instantly out there.