Jean-Paul Belmondo, who has died aged 88, was the actor who more than any other epitomised the French Nouvelle Vague. In Breathless (1960), one of the most influential films of the last six decades, the 26-year-old Belmondo played Michel Poiccard, who steals a car in Marseille, kills the policeman who follows him and hides out in Paris with his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg).

What struck one immediately were the thick, sprawling lips – on to which was stuck a Gauloise – the broken nose, and the sunglasses, suit, tie and hat worn as a homage to the great US gangster prototypes, especially Humphrey Bogart. At one stage, Poiccard looks at a film poster, runs his fingers over his lips and sighs: “Bogie.”

Despite the tough exterior, Belmondo gave the impression of fragility, with his pale, delicate skin and soft voice. The New York Times reviewer found him “hypnotically ugly” and “the most effective cigarette-mouther and thumb-to-lips rubber since time began”.

Because of Belmondo’s relaxed, naturalistic acting technique, it was assumed that the dialogue had been improvised, but it was written by the film’s director, Jean-Luc Godard, who nevertheless would not allow the actor to learn his lines but cued him during takes. In the final sequence, the camera chases Belmondo as he continues to run after being shot. As he dies, he looks up at his girlfriend, smiles knowingly and says: “C’est dégueulasse!” (“It’s shitty!”).

Because Belmondo projected an anti-conformist image, he was immediately dubbed “le James Dean français”, and after Paul Newman saw him in Paris in the early 1960s he commented: “Why, he’s one of us.” When Jean Gabin, from the golden age of prewar French cinema, co-starred with Belmondo, the darling of the New Wave, in Un Singe en Hiver (A Monkey in Winter) in 1962, he told him: “Kid, you’re me at 20.”

There was even a wave of “Belmondism”, manifesting itself in a particular style of offhand, narcissistic behaviour. Of his joli-laid looks, Belmondo commented, “Hell, everybody knows that an ugly guy with a good line gets the chicks.” At the age of 19, he had married a dancer, Élodie Constantin. In 1966 while starring in Philippe De Broca’s Up to His Ears, he and Ursula Andress fell for each other, and Élodie, the mother of their three children, filed for divorce.

In a way, it is absurd that, following Breathless, Belmondo soon chose to withdraw more and more from the New Wave directors and go into commercial films with few artistic demands – vehicle thrillers, adventure movies and acrobatic comedies, in which he became repetitious and self-parodic. The actor Claude Brasseur remarked: “Despite everything, I think it’s a pity for him making popular films because he could enjoy his métier so much more. I remember at the Conservatoire he did astonishing things. Alas, now he has become a sort of stunt man de luxe.”

What was most dispiriting about his career was that French audiences seemed to prefer it that way. When reproached, Belmondo replied: “My public expects a certain type of picture, and I’m not going to let them down.” Secure in his pre-eminence, producing many of his films himself, “Bebel”, as he was affectionately known in France, all but guaranteed a hit a year, few of which crossed the Channel or the Atlantic. Belmondo, who did not speak English, never made it to Hollywood, preferring to make American-type gangster movies such as Borsalino (1970), opposite Alain Delon, who shared top place in the box-office polls.

“Nothing impresses him. No danger, no risk, nothing serious, nothing important, nothing explained,” said the journeyman director Henri Verneuil, with whom Belmondo made eight pictures. “He never reads a scenario ahead of time. Never thinks out his role. Never says, ‘How was I in the last scene?’ Never makes suggestions.”

He was born in Paris, the grandson of an Italian workman from Piedmont who had emigrated to French Algeria. His father, Paul Belmondo, was a leading academic sculptor and a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, and his mother, Sarah (nee Rainaud-Richard), was a painter. The rebellious Jean-Paul, whose schooldays were turbulent, studied drama at the Paris Conservatory following a brief career as an amateur boxer, and for several years performed in the classics on stage in the provinces before entering the Comédie-Française.

As Breathless was Godard’s first feature, it was assumed, by some critics, that it was also Belmondo’s. In fact, Belmondo appeared in supporting roles in nine films before his “overnight” rise to fame. One of his first roles was for Marcel Carné in Les Tricheurs (The Cheaters, 1958), and the following year his portrayal of Bernadette Lafont’s uncouth Hungarian fiance in Claude Chabrol’s À Double Tour (Web of Passion) prefigured the Breathless character.

So strong was the impact of his persona in Breathless that his restrained performances as affectionate and humane characters in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960), Peter Brook’s Moderato Cantabile (1960) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Léon Morin, Priest (1961) came as a surprise, revealing an actor of a wider range than his subsequent filmography acknowledges. “He is the most accomplished actor of his generation,” claimed Melville. “He can play any given scene in 20 different ways, and all of them will be right.”

Belmondo made two further films for Melville, both in 1963: Le Doulos (The Finger Man) and L’Aîné des Ferchaux (Magnet of Doom). In the former, he suppressed his magnetic charm in the part of a sly, safecracking stool pigeon. But it was Godard who gave him his last great role, in Pierrot le Fou (1965). Belmondo as Ferdinand, dissatisfied with Parisian life, and with his wife, sets off on a picaresque journey to the south with Marianne (Anna Karina), getting involved with her criminal activities on the way.

There was a similarity between Ferdinand and Michel Poiccard – both are on the run, both are unable to assimilate into society, and each is betrayed by the woman he loves. However, Ferdinand is a more romantic and intellectual figure, acting out an existential tragedy of the transience of love. At the end, having fatally shot Karina and her boyfriend, Belmondo paints his face blue, places sticks of dynamite around his head and lights the fuse. He has second thoughts, but it is too late. “Damn, it’s too absurd!” he says before being blown up.

With challenging opportunities becoming rarer and rarer after Breathless, his acceptance of roles in François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and Alain Resnais’s Stavisky (1974) reminded audiences of his qualities. In the latter, Resnais cleverly subverted Belmondo’s charm and virility, the source of his success as a popular star, to play the notorious real-life conman.

In 1987 he returned to the stage to play the title role in Kean, the Dumas drama reinvented by Jean-Paul Sartre, and was an excellent Cyrano de Bergerac three years later, also appearing in Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear for his own theatre company at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris. One of his last films to have received an international distribution was Les Misérables (1995), Claude Lelouch’s effective updating of the Victor Hugo classic to the Nazi occupation, with Belmondo in his most challenging screen role since the 60s as an uneducated ex-boxer who befriends an intellectual Jewish family.

In 2001, Belmondo suffered a stroke, which kept him off the stage and screen until his brief return in A Man and His Dog (2008), based on De Sica’s 1952 film Umberto D. Although he had difficulty walking and speaking, he played a character with the same disabilities. However, no matter what Belmondo did, most serious film commentators would continue to see him as the young rebel who rode in on the New Wave.

His second marriage, to the dancer Nathalie Tardivel, ended in divorce in 2008. Their daughter, Stella, survives him, along with a daughter, Florence, and son, Paul, from his first marriage. Another daughter from his first marriage, Patricia, died in a fire in 1994.

• Jean-Paul Belmondo, actor, born 9 April 1933; died 6 September 2021

• Ronald Bergan died in 2020