Noémie Lvovsky has had a lot of success in her career. She was nominated once for the César for Best Actress, another time for Best Director and seven times for Best Supporting Actress. Life doesn’t scare me, Les Sentiments, Must dance, Les Beaux Gosses… There are countless classics!
But in parallel with her busy professional career, the former member of the jury of the Rome International Film Festival had to fight for many years against his alcoholism. A perilous subject, which she had decided to address in the columns of the magazine Marie Claire in 2018.”Before, I drank a lot, a lot. My close friends told me ‘You are not yourself.’ While I felt like I was myself” she had explained at first, before evoking her passage to Alcoholics Anonymous. “For a while, I went there every day, then every week.”
“Fingers crossed”
Diligent efforts that have paid off since she has been sober since 2005. But that’s not a reason to let her guard down completely and therefore take the risk that her old demons will resurface. “Fingers crossed and knock on wood, it’s never won. In thirteen years, it happened to me inadvertently to drink in a badly rinsed cup. There was a leftover amaretto. There, it’s as if sleeping Pac-Man in the brain had multiplied, like Gremlins”, she said with humor.
In 2013, it was not alcohol but the death of her father that weakened the 57-year-old director. It was thanks to him that her love for cinema was born, as she explained in an interview for Telerama : “In my early childhood, it came through my father, a fan of American comedies from the 1930s, 40s, 50s. to watch a Marx Brothers film. His smile suddenly eclipsed this gravity that never left him. He said to me: ‘Look, he’s flying!“.
A death which followed that of his mother, which occurred a few years earlier while she was filming Life doesn’t scare mea 2010 feature film dedicated to him.