Philippe Noiret was one of France’s leading actors and in a long and prolific career he made more than 100 films and won numerous international awards. He worked with most of France’s top directors and had a role in Alfred Hitchcock’s espionage drama Topaz (1969). But it was really only in middle age that his avuncular hangdog features became familiar to mainstream British and American audiences and ironically it was with the huge popular success of two Italian films, Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Il Postino (1994).

Noiret was the projectionist in Giuseppe Tornatore’s lyrical and nostalgic celebration of countless boyhoods spent in darkened provincial cinemas. It was also a celebration of the fantasies and inspirations that ultimately lead a young altar boy to leave his little Sicilian town and become a successful film director. The story is told in flashback, after Noiret’s character’s death.

Il Postino was equally powerful, with Noiret as the real-life Chilean exile, communist and poet Pablo Neruda, now living on the island of Capri. Massimo Troisi played the fictional rural postman who delivers his mail, develops a love of poetry and breaks through Neruda’s pomposity and self-importance. The film was all the more poignant because Troisi was dying at the time and did not live to share in its international success.

Cinema Paradiso won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, while Il Postino received nominations in most of the main categories. Curiously, Noiret never got even a nomination for an Oscar, though he won Bafta and European film awards for Cinema Paradiso and collected two Césars (the French equivalent of the Oscars) as Best Actor, winning in 1976 for Le Vieux Fusil (The Old Gun) and in 1990 for La Vie et Rien d’Autre (Life and Nothing But), one of several films he made with the director Bertrand Tavernier.

In A Biographical Dictionary of Film (1994), David Thomson praised Noiret’s versatility and compared him to the great American actor Robert Mitchum. “After decades of professional assignment, very little fuss, and no large claim on grandeur, he emerges as one of the medium’s treasures,” said Thomson.

Born in Lille in 1930, Noiret trained at the Centre Dramatique de l’Ouest, where his mentor was Roger Blin, who directed and starred in the original 1953 production of Waiting for Godot. Noiret spent several years touring with the Théâtre National Populaire and also worked as a nightclub comedian.

Reputedly he made his film debut in 1949 in a tiny, uncredited role in a non-musical version of Gigi while still in his teens, and he continued to make occasional appearances in French films and television throughout the 1950s. His first major international success came with a starring role in Louis Malle’s comedy Zazie dans le Métro in 1960. He played a female impersonator, with Catherine Demongeot as the foul-mouthed, young niece of the title.

He consolidated his position on the international scene when he won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance as the dull husband who inspires his wife to thoughts of murder in Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962). That same year he married the French actress Monique Chaumette, with whom he had appeared on stage and also in a 1959 French television version of Macbeth, in which Noiret was Macduff. They would go on to work on many films together.

Noiret was equally adept at drama, comedy and farce, though he was always a character actor and never a matinee idol like Marcello Mastroianni, his contemporary and co-star in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande Bouffe (Blow-Out).

The Tintin creator Hergé reportedly thought Noiret would be the perfect actor to play Captain Haddock if ever there was a live-action version of the comic strip.

As Noiret became better-known he found himself in demand for supporting roles in international productions. The role of a Soviet mole in Hitchcock’s Topaz brought him the award for Best Supporting Actor from the National Board of Review in the US. He appeared with Peter O’Toole in the war films The Night of the Generals (1967) and Murphy’s War (1971) and he was part of a starry international cast that included Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas in the historical romp The Assassination Bureau (1969).

His performances could be tragic, comic, poignant or faintly absurd, or some combination of them all. In La Grande Bouffe he played one of four successful but bored men who meet up in a villa with the intention of eating themselves to death. “Ferreri uses shock tactics and excremental schoolboy humour to make a wearisome, excessive movie about excess,” wrote one critic. Nevertheless it was another international hit.

Noiret was one of a handful of French actors who established a significant following in English-language territories while working mainly in French-language films, though he also made numerous Italian-language films. He was a lazy but likeable farmer in Alexandre (1967), a man who discovers his son is a murderer in Bertrand Tavernier’s The Watchmaker of St Paul (1974), an ambitious judge who has the life of a killer in his hands in another Tavernier film The Judge and the Assassin (1976), and a general in The Desert of the Tartars (1976).

As he grew older, his characterisations arguably acquired greater depth and consequently more emotional resonance, typified by his performance in Cinema Paradiso, a performance that heralded the beginning of the most rewarding chapter in his career.

Noiret delivered one of his most celebrated performances as a French major dealing with amnesiac survivors of the First World War in La Vie et Rien d’Autre. He also played the classic hero D’Artagnan as an old man in his film La Fille de d’Artagnan (1994), with Sophie Marceau as the eponymous daughter.

He continued working until recently. After his death, the French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, said: “Through his voice, his allure, his panache, Philippe Noiret knew how to seize and express something within the French soul.”

He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Philippe Noiret, actor, was born on October 1, 1930. He died of cancer on November 23, 2006, aged 76