“All the work is to tell stories for others”

From actress to novelist, Evelyne Dress has several lives, like the cats she loves: director, producer, distributor, painter, are the other strings to her bow. She reveals them to us on the occasion of the release of her tenth novel. Five days in the life of a woman (Éditions Glyphe), based on a lived experience, a solitary escapade in Biarritz during Christmas Eve.

Franceinfo Culture: What a journey, from actress to writer, via director and producer! How did this journey from images to words take place?

Evelyn Dress: First an actress, with a career in theatre, cinema and television. I am remembered in And fucking tenderness (Patrick Schulmann, 1979, editor’s note). I had a steady career after going to school in the rue Blanche. I was often then on Antenne 2, future France Televisions, with in particular Louis Bériot, president of the chain, and proposed projects to him. I wanted to play police commissioner. I had no desire to write then. It was then that he asked me to host a television and radio show. I tell him it’s my dream, like Dean Martin, Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, I want to sing, dance, laugh and cry, tap dance, host a TV show, that’s my thing. He directs me to Elkabbach in search of a host for a night show on Europe 1 and Antenne 2.

So I hosted this daily radio and TV show, which was called Enter without knocking from midnight to one o’clock in the morning. But at the time, in 1987, it was very frowned upon for actors to “compromise” themselves on television, it was a crime against majesty. The same goes for people on radio or TV who took a very dim view of an actress taking the place of a presenter. It was a very, very painful experience. When she stopped, I thought about my future, quite depressed, I took a year off. And then a miracle happened, I discovered that I was able to paint. I painted day and night. Until then I was a puppet whose strings were pulled, always dependent on the gaze of others, I was not the engine of my life. Realizing that I was capable of painting made me invincible. It was a real birth for me. So I decided, from there, to be mistress of my life.

How was this independence expressed?

I came across a text that upset me, The butcher by Alina Rayès, a bestseller at Le Seuil which told in 90 pages the sexual fantasies of a butcher about his cashier, told by her, with the words of flesh, death and sex. And it is with these words that I wanted to return to the theater, but I was refused, it was 30 years before The Vagina Monologues. So I created my company and produced the show, performed at the Bataclan with Rufus. It was the show of the moment, it smelled of sulfur.

At the same time, at night, I was writing a film script called No love without love, to tell about my generation which struggled to acquire its sexual, social, intellectual, professional independence, and which finds itself twenty years later at zero. Nobody wanted to make this movie. So I created my production company and shot with Patrick Chesnais, Gérard Darmon, Martin Lamotte, Michel Duchaussoy, Jean-Luc Bideau, Aurore Clément… and I played the main role. As I had produced, written, performed and directed it, I was told, “well now distribute it”. So I distributed it and the film made 158,000 admissions with very few cinemas, but it made 7,129,080 viewers when it was broadcast on France 2, which bought the film from me. This allowed me to lift the mortgage on my apartment that I had contracted to finish my film. I wanted to go back to directing, but the people in the business didn’t want to cut me short. Instead of helping me, they did the opposite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFjBVwrJE0E

I was lucky that Plon editions saw the film and asked me to write. I submitted projects to them and published three novels with them and with Pocket. Writing repaired my wounds, I took a liking to it and it is now a pleasure to write. I am on my tenth novel.

You write autofiction, why this public confidence, even if it is fictionalized?

“I am another”. I think it’s the whole job of writers to tell stories. Where it becomes interesting is when we get out of navel-gazing, it’s to try to reach out to others, that my experience merges with that of others, that they find themselves there. In Five days in the life of a woman, my latest novel, I hope I deliver a life lesson for those who have reached the third part of life. And a lesson of hope for those who are afraid of growing old. Until the end something can happen. I would also like things to move a little in the cottages, we still have an outdated vision of the 70-year-old woman. Today, she is no longer a grandmother. She is still capable of wanting to make love.

My books also allowed me to come out of my suffering in relation to my Jewishness. All my books are crossed by the question “but what is it to be Jewish?”. It’s not that I answered it, but the question pains me less. Reason why in my last books, my heroine is always a bit Jewish, but as she says in Five days in the life of a woman, she met a man who might be the right number as long as he has no problem with his Jewishness. In my next novel in progress, there is no question of Jewishness, which does not surprise me, as if a course had been passed. So the last three were written during lockdown, so they’re maybe a little more introspective. But I have undertaken other important books for me where I will settle accounts with my family and my Jewishness.

You are also a painter, from painting to cinema there is only one step, what is your relationship to the image and to your image?

I had a mother who convinced me that I was ugly. So I lived like an ugly, until not long ago. There are models who find themselves very ugly and who suffer. And no doubt that if I hadn’t found myself so ugly, I would have had another career. I suffered from my great shyness, I never go into a shop because I’m afraid that everyone will turn on me and realize that I’m poor. My family did not live in opulence, we often bought baguettes on credit. I see in my relatives the casualness, the assurance that money gives and when you have little, it does not give you the wings to be able to fly away. I felt like an ugly duckling. Moreover, my father, who was a tailor, made my clothes for me, but always too big, hoping that I was going to take on opulence, which meant that I saw myself in the windows always badly dressed.

In your latest novel, Five days in the life of a womanwhat is the part of truth and fiction, you stage?

At the time of No love without love, I was at odds with my family and found myself alone in Paris, I took a ticket to Biarritz, as in the novel. I tell the truth, the situation of a single woman who dines alone, one evening on Christmas Eve with a bottle of Château Pavis that I drank, whereas I never drink. I was sick as a dog, and I took notes on my night, I attended a concert like in the novel. I started from a true story, from the loneliness of a woman. At the time, I was not 70 years old, but it doesn’t matter, you always experience loneliness in the same way. Then there is a mixture of several things. I used several men for the character of Monsieur Lassa… The physiotherapist is a fantasy. The thalassotherapy scenes inspire sensuality in the moistness and as I really like to write and paint sensuality, it is the appropriate medium.

You still paint, wouldn’t you rather write scripts, plays, direct?

I no longer paint because I had to take a smaller apartment and no longer have a studio. As I paint very large formats, I don’t have the space. I am very sad about it, moreover, not to paint anymore and not to be able to hang my paintings on the walls.

Otherwise, I made several adaptations which are in my drawers but I never had the audacity to write theater. In this area, I admire Jean-Claude Grimbert, his economy of words, his powerful situations, the silences, I would have liked to write this kind of theatre. Scenarios, I have plenty of drawers. Because I adapt my novels. For example, Petichet’s House is a scenario that I would really like to shoot. I adapted Rangoon rendezvous which takes place in Burma, an adventure film. For others, like Jerusalem Sunflowersthat would take too much money.

What is your current novel about?

It takes place in 1920 from Nîmes to New York, until 1924, I can’t say more.