His face is well known to the general public. Frederic Deban has long camped Grégory Lacroix in the successful series of TF1, Under the sun. He knew glory, but everything changed for him a few years ago. The 57-year-old comedian is deaf. This hearing loss, he tells it in front of the cameras of TFX, in the documentaries What have they become ? broadcast Friday, July 8, 2022.
He thought he was having a crazy evening on the other side of the world. In reality, Frédéric Deban saw his life go by that day. “I was in Brazil in a favela, we were celebrating my 50th birthday. There was a big party and there was a fighthe recalls. I gave a guy a pie and he came back ten minutes later. He threw a bottle at my head.“After one night, he realized what had happened to him:”The next day, when I woke up, I had a completely indefinable noise in my head and, above all, I no longer heard my friends when they spoke to me. I only heard this noise. It was quite powerful. It was the strength of a Boeing 747 taking off, but never taking off.“
This incident changed him forever. Frédéric Deban thus experienced a “long descent into hell“, thus losing 80% of his hearing. And that’s not all. From the depths of his being, he was despite himself transformed by this upheaval. “You change, your character changes, your social life changes, you lose your libido. Me who was a hot rabbit… anyway. It must be said, we must also talk about it because it is part of life. At 50, we are not dead“, he regrets then.
A year earlier, in May 2021, the actor mentioned another consequence of this health glitch: financially, he was ruined. “It is difficult to go from 1200 euros per day to assistance for disabled adults. I had to go through the RSA box…“, he said, revealing with regret that he had not known how to invest his money correctly at the time in order to ensure a comfortable future.