It is with great emotion that the actress Judith Godreche is returning to the forefront of the French scene. Starring in the series Icon of French Cinema programmed on Arte, which she herself created and which is autobiographical, in the latter she returns to the excesses of French cinema, and to her traumatic beginnings as an actress, when she was only 14 years old . Guest of Léa Salamé this Saturday December 23, 2023 on France 2 in What an era to ensure its promotion, the ex-wife of Dany Boon returned with emotion to the relationship she shared with the director Benoît Jacquot almost forty years ago, when she was only 14; he was already 40.
In an interview given to She At the beginning of December, Judith Godrèche returned for the first time to the controlling relationship she shared with Benoît Jacquotwhile the latter was 26 years his senior: “If a 40-year-old man approaches my daughter, I’ll kill him. It’s because I have a teenage daughter that I manage to realize what happened to me, to tell myself that I navigated alone in a world without rules or laws” condemns the actress today. Judith Godrèche remembers a scene that particularly traumatized her, where she found herself invited to a social dinner when she was only 15 years oldand that she forces herself to drink to please the men in the middle, much more mature than her: “I was served wine, I was 15, I fell dead on the table, I vomited in front of everyone. I wonder, in hindsight, if the adults were wondering: There’s a problem, she’s too little, what is she doing there?
“Something validated by the system”
Questioned about this dinner by Léa Salamé and Christophe Dechavanne, Judith Godrèche returned with great emotion to this trauma, and more generally to the toxic relationship she shared with Benoît Jacquot, and which made her “vulnerable” : “I vomited on the table, and even on a very great film critic who worked for Les Cahiers du Cinéma, and afterwards I passed out, and I woke up only later (…) I think there was something totally validated by the system at the timeand basically, no, the question did not arise since I was part of an artistic environment, cinema, which supported that. No adult has ever asked me, never looked at me, not even a kind of questioning look, nothing.”
During the interview, Léa Salamé unearths a TV interview that Judith Godrèche gave to FR3 on October 25, 1990. Just of age, the young woman comes to promote the film The Disenchantedin which she plays the title role. But seeing Benoît Jacquot again, who was then her companion but also the director of this film, the actress collapsed in tears on the set : “It’s very special. I think it’s the first time I’ve cried on television (…) It’s very special, because obviously, I saw these images again only very, very, very recently , and besides, the first time I saw these images again, it was Arte who sent them to me. And basically, it was through the promotion of this series, it was through the women that I meet, it is through my daughter’s generation, it is through Alma Struve who plays my child role in the series, that, through them, what they perceive and their perception of consent, that in the bottom, when I look at myself, there is a form of awareness that moves me : it’s true that these are images that I haven’t looked at since I was very little, that I haven’t even thought about. It was so, so, so buried inside me.”
She was also preyed upon by Harvey Weinstein
On October 31, 2017, Judith Godrèche was one of the first women to publicly affirm having been sexually abused by American producer Harvey Weinstein during the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. She claims that the filmmaker invited her to a hotel room to discuss the release of the film Ridicule, and found herself trapped there: “I was so naive and unprepared for this” the actress told the New York Times. Petrified, traumatized by the attack she suffered after refusing her a massage, Judith Godrèche spoke about it to a Miramax manager, who ordered her to remain silent. A silence that will end after 21 years. He was sentenced to 23 years of imprisonment in 2020 in a first case for which he appealed, and to 16 years in prison for another case in 2023.