Decleir heeft voor het toneel gewerkt, maar bereikte een miljoenenpubliek met zijn optredens in speelfilms.
JanDecleir debuteerde als filmacteur in 1971 in de productie van Fons Rademakers Mira.
Bij de kleinsten onder ons is Decleir vooral bekend als Sinterklaas in het kinderprogramma Dag Sinterklaas (1993), dat telkens rond de Sinterklaasperiode uitgezonden wordt op Ketnet.
JanDecleir is Angelo Ledda, the skilled hired gun silently battling his accelerated memory loss by continually popping medication, and who has to resort to writing even the simplest things on his arm in order to help him remember.
There's no mistaking Decleir is a cold-blooded killer—Van Looy shows him carrying out executions with a clinical efficiency—but like Jean Reno's Léon, his "no kids" rule changes the playing field permanently.
Decleir's Angelo Ledda is perhaps not as purely anti-hero sympathetic as Léon, and it's the early onset of Alzheimer's that has begun to cripple him.
JanDecleir (born February 14, 1946), is a prolific Belgian movie and stage actor born in Niel, Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium).
More recently he turned down roles in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (due to commitments to other projects) and The World Is Not Enough.
In 2003 he had the starring role in the critically acclaimed thriller The Memory of a Killer (The Alzheimer's Case) of which the leading American film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review: "JanDecleir never goes for the easy effect, never pushes too hard, is a rock-solid occupant of his character.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Jan_Decleir (317 words)
Amazon.com: Character: DVD: Jan Decleir,Jonathan Maxwell Reeves,Fedja van HuĂȘt,Betty Schuurman,Tamar van den ...(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
His son, Katadreuffe (Fedja van Huet), is the offspring of a single night's passion with his housekeeper--in an interesting twist he hounds her to marry him, and she leaves with the boy to raise him on her own.
Katadreuffe (Fedja Van Huet) is the illegitimate son of a hardworking mother (Betty Schuurman) and the despised town bailiff (JanDecleir) she has refused to marry.
The undertones of the wretched relationship between father and son are presented with superb craftmanship by JanDecleir.
Bela Lugosi look-alike JanDecleir stars as an accomplished veteran hit man wrestling with an advanced case of Alzheimer's.
But before he can go gently into that good night, Decleir stumbles upon a trail of child-prostitute murders with roots leading all the way up to a corrupt baron.
An avenging angel, Decleir begins systematically killing his way to the top.
When aging hit man Angelo Ledda (JanDecleir) discovers how thoroughly corrupt his new employers are, he decides to turn his professional skills against them.
But while Ledda is a skilled and cunning master of his trade, he nevertheless finds himself pushed to the limit—and racing desperately against time—when the acceleration of his Alzheimer’s disease threatens to make his mission impossible.
Greeted with acclaim at film festivals worldwide, this enormously clever, visually dazzling and breathtakingly paced modern film noir (originally titled The Alzheimer Case) is developing a true cult following, due in no small part to the extraordinary performance of JanDecleir.
Character | Plot | MTV Movies(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
Dreverhaven (JanDecleir), the most ruthless and intimidating bailiff in Rotterdam, is brutally murdered, and a young attorney, Katadreuffe (Fedja Van Huet), is arrested in connection with the crime.
Under questioning, the angry young lawyer reveals a hidden motive for the killing -- he is Dreverhaven's illegitimate son.
Eventually, Joba takes in a boarder, Jan Maan (Hans Kesting), and Jan becomes something of a father figure to the boy, urging him to improve himself and pursue new opportunities in business.
Pretty photography of running horses in wide-open spaces is about all this movie has to offer beyond predictability and annoyingly unceasing narration.
You got your burly, heartless mine boss (barrel-chested Belgian JanDecleir) and his bratty, pugsy young son (an 8-year-old dandy with a riding crop) as antagonists for the boy.
As is, however, all but horse-crazy little girls will likely be crawling the walls with boredom after the first couple reels.
CityBeat Film Reviews(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
European actorJanDecleir might have never met Hollywood legends Robert Mitchum, James Coburn or Lee Marvin but he channels them perfectly as Angelo Ledda, an elderly hit man who turns the tables on his corrupt employers after assassinating an Antwerp, Belgium civil servant.
Originally called The Alzheimer Case, renamed The Memory of a Killer for U.S. theaters, the tweak director/co-writer Erik Van Looy makes on his vengeful assassin tale is giving his anti-hero Alzheimer’s.
But as the bodies pile up and the conspiracy thickens, it’s the imposing Decleir, clad in a dark suit and a white dress shirt, who grounds the visual flash with a character strong enough to hold one’s attention.
That is how I started my life." And meanwhile you're watching the wobbly foal stagger to his baby hooves, pitched about by the ocean, or more precisely, the ocean-effect concocted on a dank and clammy-looking sound stage.
To be sure, there are moments when Richard's unnamed "Boss Man" (JanDecleir) seems about to put the kebash on the boy's burgeoning friendship with the horse especially when goaded by his also unnamed and preternaturally hostile son (Daniel J. Robbertse), who appears determined for some ingrained Aryanite reason to torture Richard the Commoner.
But for the most part, Lucky's relationship with Richard is uninhibited by the usual human abuses (say, the kind that plagued poor Black Beauty back in the day).
european-films.net - review: De zaak Alzheimer (The Alzheimer Case / Memory of a Killer)(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
They are confronted with several seemingly unconnected murders, except for the fact that the method of killing seems to have been the same.
The trail leads to the aging contract killer Angelo Ledda (Decleir), who wants to get out of the business because he has the developing symptoms of the memory-plaguing Alzheimer’s disease; not really the ideal disease for a job for which such precision and concentration is required.
He has agreed to one last job killing two people in his native Belgium, but turns against his patron when he discovers one of them is a 13-year-old child.
For years, Jean-Jacques Annaud had wanted to do a sequel of sorts to his "The Bear." Now "The Bear" was a real rarity, a fictional animal film which wasn't sickeningly saccharine.
The horses are driven off the ship to the land, and being just a baby, Lucky can't swim nearly as fast as the rest, but manages to make it to shore just in time to miss his mother.
He is put on the train, but almost dies of exhaustion and dehydration, but is saved by a young boy named Richard(Chase Moore) who works in the stable of the boss of a village in the middle of nowhere(Jan Decleir), who lets Richard keep the colt because he sees the lad could use a friend.
The Memory of a Killer | movies : ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
A lot of thrillers have asked us to identify with assassins the genre dates at least back to The Day of the Jackal, in 1973 but I'd be hard-pressed to name one that makes a hitman as sympathetic, if not sentimental, as The Memory of a Killer.
Angelo Ledda (JanDecleir) is a veteran of his trade, the sort of roving international lethal weapon to whom the standard adjectives (ruthless, tight-lipped) all apply.
At this point, I was just about ready for an Oprah episode (''Hitmen Who Cry Inside''), and it might have been had the Flemish actorJanDecleir not played Ledda with burning eyes and a dog-of-hell scowl reminiscent of the later De Niro.
The movie is cat-and-mouser about an hired gun who finds a conscience when he realizes his latest target is a little girl -- not unlike Jennifer Garner in the crummy comic-book bomb "Elektra," except that the brilliant JanDecleir ("Character") isn't a 30-year-old hottie back from the dead in skin-tight leather.
Putting himself at risk by bucking his assignment, the killer tries to steer a hunky cop (Koen De Bouw), who is hot on his trail, toward a climactic showdown with a much bigger fish: a wealthy baron whose child-molester son wanted the girl dead.
A star of De Niro-like proportions in northern Europe, the ominously hulking Decleir gives a typically potent performance (for which he won Best Actor when "Killer" swept the Belgian film awards).
JanDecleir, Koen De Bow, Werner De Smedt, Jo De Meyere, Gene Verboets, Dirk Roofhooft, Laurien Van den Broeck, Deborah Ostrega, Hilde De Baerdemaeker, Geert Van Rampelberg
Angelo Ledda (JanDecleir) is an international hitman who has been hired to terminate two people in Belgium.
Unknown to those around him, Ledda has advanced symptoms of Alzheimer’s, and this double murder will likely be his last.
Jan Decleir(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
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Art Film 1999 Daily - Jan Decleir(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
Films such as 'Antonia's Line' (1995) and 'Character' (1996), which were awarded Oscars for the best foreign film, are sufficient evidence of Dutch cinematography's growth in quality.
The main male protagonist in both of these films, the Belgian theatre and film actorJanDecleir, is considered to be one of the most significant European film actors of the moment.
How has this success at the Academy Award ceremonies affected the Dutch film industry?
Police thriller set in Antwerp centers on an aging hit man.
The Movie: The masterful performance of Belgian actorJanDecleir as an aging hit man (think grandfather, not Pierce Brosnan) lends human drama to what is essentially a police thriller, set in Antwerp but as slick as any Hollywood production.
Director Erik Van Looy's stylish direction and brisk plotting keep what might have been an overambitious story (flmail, child prostitution, good cops, bad cops, car bombs, etc.) smoothly humming along.