Actress Charlotte Valandrey died on Wednesday July 13 at the age of 53, her agent told AFP. She revealed his HIV status in 2005 with his autobiography love in the blood, big bookstore success (180,000 sales), then adapted into a TV movie. The actress had been consecrated by the film Red Kiss in 1985, then by the series Les Cordiers, judge and cop and the series Tomorrow belongs to us.
Her triple therapy had exhausted her heart and she had recourse to a transplant in 2003, which made her the first HIV-positive heart transplant patient in France. The actress fought all her life as a warrior. If, on several occasions, she has “I wanted to give up”as she admitted in March, she overcomes the vicissitudes. “My trials have taught me to be afraid of deathshe confided one day to The Express. Or more exactly to be afraid that life stops. She took on such a flavor for me.”
Fate caught up with her at 53. New hospitalization in intensive care. His second heart flinch in turn. “Waiting for my 3rd”, she wrote on Instagram on June 8. With a humor tinged with weariness. “I need all your positive vibes. Because the Warrior is less Warrior…” If, only a few days later, she obtains a new heartthe transplant is a failure.
Born November 29, 1968 in Paris, Anne-Charlotte Pascal grew up in a wealthy family. His father develops calculation software, his mother is a pianist. First castings as a teenager. She opts for the pseudonym “Valandrey”, a tribute to Val André, the seaside resort of her Breton childhood.
Small, slender but quite a temperament. Brunette girl with blue eyes laser light up film Red Kiss (1985) by Véra Belmont, her first role. She embodies, in France during the Cold War, Nadia, a young rebel who militates in the Young Communists and sees her ideal waver after a romantic encounter (Lambert Wilson). Huge success. He is predicted a fate like Sophie Marceau, two years his senior. She won the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlin, was nominated for the César for best female hope.
A few days before her 18th birthday, she learns that she has contracted HIV. With a “gothic prince”, member of a famous rock band, she will say. She kept her seropositivity silent until 2005. “The disease, this bitch, I kept her at a distance”she confided to The Express. She only informs her parents and lovers. Candidate for the main role of white wedding (1989), she also shares her secret with the director. Vanessa Paradis is chosen…
“The sequins fly away like ashes… Something had broken, the cinema had left me.” Certainly, she bounces on television playing from 1991 to 2000 in the series Les Cordiers, judge and cop (up to 11.4 million viewers) or in tomorrow belongs to us (2017-2019). But will never have the career to which she seemed promised. And she has to fight every day. “Coming out of my transplant [du cœur], I weighed 35 kg. I divorced, moved, I no longer had a job or a social life. It was a lot.”
She hangs on, especially for her daughter Tara, born HIV-negative in 2000 from her “will to survive”. As during this new blow in 2008. A heart attack. His heart stops beating for 22 seconds. It goes up the slope, in particular thanks to psychoanalysis. Finds the path of the boards, starts singing and continues in writing, with a seventh book published in 2022 Reconcile with yourself. She is also actively involved in favor of organ donation and becomes the godmother of the “Greffe de vie” foundation.