You can hide a lot of things behind a smile. If there’s one celebrity who could perfectly represent this phrase, it would be Anny Duperey. The 75-year-old actress has become, over the years, one of the sure values of French cinema and television. It is not for nothing that for nearly twenty-six years, she embodied alongside Bernard Lecoq one of the pillars ofA great family. She played the role of Catherine Beaumont, generous, altruistic, sympathetic and smiling, in her exact image in real life.
But here it is, looking happy and uneventful is not everything and Anny Duperey is well placed to know it. The actress, seen in Freinds Where Germinal, experienced a dramatic episode in his youth that marked his life forever. As she confided in 2021 to Non Stop People, the actress found her two parents dead at home, when she was only 8 years old: “There was significant trauma. My little sister was only five months old when, one Sunday morning, I found both my parents dead in the bathroom, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.“
The consequences of the trauma did not reveal themselves immediately: “At first there was a kind of denial of mourning, a little bit depressive. At 13, I made a kind of pretend suicide attempt by getting myself under a car that didn’t want me“, she declared. After the tragic disappearance of Ginette and Lucien Legras because of a defective water heater, Anny Duperey was entrusted to her aunt. Patricia, her 5-month-old sister at the time of the accident and who died in 2009, was entrusted to her paternal grandparents. This separation has also cost them their relationship: “We never really solved this story, I could almost say that it died of it (…) Despite our efforts to cooperate, we have not succeeded in overcoming this problem.“
Experiencing such a shock in childhood had consequences on the role of mother that Anny Duperey endorses in life with Sara, 37 years old and Gaël, 40 years old? Absolutely not, it would even be quite the contrary: “Since I had no role model, I tried to raise my children by watching other mothers. Finally, I found them too heavy, too restless. So I embraced letting go. Later, my children told me that I had managed to be a light, attentive, present and not at all intrusive mother.“In short, a great mom!