Woman of cinema and theater, Agnès Jaoui celebrates her 58th birthday on October 19, 2022, the opportunity to reflect on her magnificent career. A journey in which Jean-Pierre Bacri holds a very special place. The actor and screenwriter has formed with her a loving and creative duo that has produced magnificent works. Four hands that have written variations around humans and their relationships with others with, to name but a few, Un air de famille for example. In interview for french culturethe one to whom we owe The taste of Others and is a mother of two children confides in her life in several episodes. Among these, there is his meeting with the free man that was Jean-Pierre Bacri. She evokes with a perceptible emotion in her voice her role in her life and in particular her relationship with the family.
Agnès Jaoui was a theater actress when she met Jean-Pierre while performing the play The birthday by Harold Pinter. “I was 22 years old. I just remember that I told my father that I had met someone I was very much in love with but he was old. (…) I said 35, 36 years old, I don’t know. I remember my dad bursting out laughing“, she remembers for France Culture.
Between Agnès Jaoui, coming from a very present and conciliatory family, and Jean-Pierre Bacri who “hated the family“, not his but the notion in general, the duo could have been complicated. But no, their couple was born at a particular moment in the life of the artist. “There was like a break with my family from there. I kinda went from one religion to another“, she confides. “There was obviously a before and an after Jean-Pierre in my life. At any point of view. I also took a certain distance, but it wasn’t just Jean-Pierre. It’s also that I started therapy when I was 21. There’s been a long way. My family, loving as it was, it’s complicated. I think you have to separate from your family to grow, you have to cut roots for the shoots to grow back.“
Great love and late teenage crisis
And it was at 30 that Agnès Jaoui made her “period of teenage rebellion“.”It’s very difficult. (…) I had been left free of everything, I did not see what to oppose. It’s later, also with the help of Jean-Pierre… Although I had a very open family and a psychotherapist mother, the same denial happened as in many families. When an abuse is revealed, it does not happen at all what one thinks it could happen. (…) We can’t hear it for a lot of reasons, it’s put under the carpet”says this daughter of an author and trainer and a psychotherapist specializing in transactional analysis.
A period during which she was able to count on the support of her companion, from whom she separated in 2012, without any enmity: “Jean-Pierre counted a lot because also, on that side. (…) He represented the law, he had something about the just that was very, very strong.“For her, her righteousness is certainly what made her death, on January 18, 2022 at the age of 69 as a result of cancer, affect France so much.That’s why he was so loved“, will say the heroine and author of Kitchen and outbuildings.