Arielle Dombasle releases her 13th album, “Iconics”

Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Monday May 27, 2024: actress, singer, director and revue leader, Arielle Dombasle. She is releasing a new album: “Iconics”.

Arielle Dombasle is a unique, atypical artist. It is through the films of Éric Rohmer, television series like Miami Vice or even films that have become cult An Indian in the city (1994), Asterix and Obelix against Caesar (1999) that the public discovered it. And then music entered his career, first with the album Liberta in 2000. Today, she releases a new opus icons in the form of a tribute to the personalities of emblematic female figures such as Judy Garland, Marlène Dietrich, Shirley Bassey and Joséphine Baker.

franceinfo: icons these are eight titles that are at once sensual, feminine, gentle and determined. A bit like you.

Arielle Dombasle: I hope my album sounds like me. It is indeed a tribute to the feminine, to these figures who dazzled me. It’s a bit of an ethic of admiration. When I was a child, I loved my Barbie doll immensely. Afterwards, I suffered from being reduced to a Barbie doll. But after all, in this album, I pay homage to her because she was a very futuristic doll, very avant-garde and the first feminist doll because it made little girls want to be all kinds of things. We bought the barbie doll, lawyer, housewife, skater, astronaut, doctor and we said to ourselves: “This is what awaits me in the future” and we chose to play with something that already excited you.

What does this album mean to you?

A tribute to the women who could have been mothers, in any case who raised me. And I like to take, for example, Diamonds Are Forever by Shirley Bassey, this woman who embodied, for example, the new female figures of James Bond, who are strong women, who are female spies, fighters.

At the start, there is indeed dancing. It is one of the anchor points that will lead you to the stage, to the theater, to stage expression. You have an indomitable side. Your grandfather was French consul in Calcutta. Then, he was one of the first to join General de Gaulle when he was in exile in London. He created Free France. Did you keep that from him?

I was a little intimidated by the environment I was born into, because it was the embassies, very brilliant people, remarkable people. And they called my grandfather, His Excellency. He was indeed a remarkable person who saved a considerable number of people during the war, who received all the exiled artists in America and who was therefore a hero. And his wife Man’ha Garreau-Dombasle is the person who meant the most in my existence. A woman of letters and woman, with this magnetism which meant that she was surrounded by artists.

What did you dream about as a child?

I started as a baby, and then straight away, I was dancing, I was singing. I knew as a child. I always imagined that I would be on stage and in the spotlight. I was chosen by Éric Rohmer for Percival the Welsh. I started like that, with medieval airs.

“Music gave me cinema.”

Arielle Dombasle

at franceinfo

Let’s talk about these women you’re taking over. They were part of the emancipation of women who sometimes put their lives in danger. What do you like about being a woman?

What I like is that they already have a slightly more enviable position than during 21 centuries of male domination. Being a woman in the 21st century is a good thing. We are still far from living on a level of equality. But there are many areas on which, fortunately, our mothers and grandmothers obtained a lot of things, and in particular Simone de Beauvoir.