Venice Film Festival honours French cinema legend Jean-Paul Belmondo

French cinema legend Jean-Paul Belmondo’s glittering career was recognised with an honorary Golden Lion at the Venice film festival on Thursday.

“I never think about my past. Forward, forward, forward,” the 83-year-old told reporters, before reminiscing about his life on the silver screen.

Belmondo, who suffered a serious stroke in 2001, had to be helped onto the press conference stage and was visibly out-of-breath, yet still “very happy, very honoured to be here in Venice.”

Among the memories he touched on were being asked to star alongside the young Sofia Loren in Vittorio De Sica’s 1960 film La Ciociara (Two Women), which helped make him a star in Italy.

“Then I played opposite Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale and that is why I have always loved Italian cinema,” he joked.

The actor, whose films have been seen by 130 million cinema goers, also touched on his supposed rivalry with fellow French heart-throb Alain Delon, with whom he starred in the 1970 gangster film Borsalino.

“I’m a mate of Alain Delon and when you’re mates it is for life,” he said.

Like Delon, Belmondo mixed art house productions with more box office-friendly fare over the course of his extraordinary career.

“I enjoyed both — it is like life; one day you laugh, the next you cry.”

Belmondo was accompanied by French actress Sophie Marceau, his son Paul — the director of a documentary about his father — and actor friend Charles Gerard as he received his award to a standing ovation.

“Jean-Paul Belmondo is a star, a complete, multifaceted actor, a cinema producer, a theatre director and also the head of a big and beautiful family,” said Marceau, who acted alongside her compatriot in Georges Lautner’s Joyeuses Paques (1984).

“I remember when you took me in your arms and I also remember Claudia Cardinale, Sofia Loren, Ursula Andress, Jean Seberg .... Catherine Deneuve ... because even wearing a cassock you made them all fall for you.”