Ironically, the French actor and director Jean Yanne, who has died of a heart attack aged 69, had the effect of being loved, particularly by the French, for his persona of the acerbic, irascible, boorish, bullheaded bourgeois. This character was typified by his role in Jean Luc Godard's Weekend (1967). As the nasty and greedy chain-smoking husband of an equally unpleasant wife (Mireille Darc), he continually growls, swears and snarls while the couple make their dog-eat-dog way across an apocalyptic France in their red Facel-Vega.
Although Yanne had already appeared in five films, it was Weekend that revealed him to an international audience. He had already made a reputation on French radio and in cabaret, portraying, as he once explained, "a pathological cretin expressing leftwing ideas with rightwing vocabulary".
Yanne was born Jean Gouyé into a working-class Parisian family. In many of his angry, satirical songs, cabaret routines and scripts, he would use the argot of his "prolo" background. After an unhappy three-year stint in the army in Algeria, during which he gained a lasting distaste for authority, he studied journalism. He then met a director of a cabaret in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, for whom he provided sketches.
Taking on the pseudonym of Jean Yanne, he began to perform the sketches himself in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as becoming a well-known radio commentator, particularly on a programme entitled When I Hear The Word Culture I Take Out My Transistor. He also wrote pop songs for a group called Hector et les Médiators.
Yanne came into films at the tailend of la nouvelle vague, getting to work with Claude Chabrol, who, in 1969, gave him two of his best roles, in The Butcher and This Man Must Die! (Que La Bête Meure!). In the latter, Yanne pulls out all the stops as a nouveau-riche lout, described by the father of the boy he has killed in a hit-and-run accident as "a monstrous being, such as one can't imagine".
However, he revealed hitherto unseen depths in the title role of The Butcher. As an emotionally disturbed man, who pays court to the equally lonely and repressed schoolmistress (Stéphane Audran), he managed to evoke both compassion and aversion.
He seldom had such a chance again, one of the few exceptions being in Maurice Pialat's Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We Will Not Grow Old Together), for which his forceful performance won him the best actor award in Cannes in 1972. In the film, he plays a selfish and domineering husband, painfully breaking up with his much younger lover (Marléne Jobert). Characteristically, Yanne was not in Cannes to pick up his award as he had fallen out with the equally cantankerous Pialat.
In the same year, he made the first of the seven films he directed and wrote, Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil (Everybody Is Nice, Everybody Is Beautiful), a caustic satire on television and radio commercials, which was a huge box-office success in France.
He followed this with another bitter comedy, Moi y en a vouloir des sous (Me, I Want Money, 1973), a diatribe which attacked the trade unions, among other targets. Then came The Chinese In Paris (1974), which imagined what would happen if Mao's Red Army occupied the French capital. The critic of Le Monde called it "a monument of scorn and base morality," from which Yanne extracted the words "a monument" to put on the posters.
The rest of the films he dir- ected were a matter of diminishing returns: Chobizenesse (Show Business, 1975), Je te tiens, tu me tiens par la barbichette (I Hold You And You Hold Me By The Small Goatee, 1978), Deux heures moins le quart avant Jésus-Christ (Quarter To Two Before Jesus Christ, 1982), and Liberté, Egalité, Choucroute (1985), the last two being vulgar, anachronistic period parodies.
In the 1980s, Yanne left France for tax reasons to live in Los Angeles, explaining that "French cinema bores me shitless. I'm in showbiz, so I live in Hollywood. If I was making nougat, I would live in Montélimar."
Nevertheless, he returned home in the 1990s, where he continued to appear in commercial films exploiting his bastard image, best of all as the collaborationist prime minister Laval, in Petain (1993). He kept on working until his death. His final film, The Return Of James Bataille, a science-fiction epic is yet to be released.
Yanne, who is survived by his former wife and two children, discussed the impact of his death in an interview in 1999. "I know I lot of nonsense will be talked. In the first days, my friends will say, 'What a great loss', and during the following 10 years, each time one of my films is shown, there will be a tribute to me on television. I hope that in a hundred years they won't show Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil on a space shuttle."
· Jean Yanne (Jean Gouyé), actor, director, songwriter, born July 18 1933; died May 23 2003