If Thierry Lhermitte is used to playing the womanizer on the screen, he is far from really being so in life. When the cameras are off and Thierry Lhermitte finds his family, the actor spends most of his time with his wife Hélène. And it has been going on for decades! Thierry Lhermitte met Hélène when he was still only a young actor who performed on a few stages of café-theater with the troupe of Splendid. But before meeting Hélène and forming a family after the arrival of their very first child, Astrée, in 1975, then those of Victor and Louise, Thierry Lhermitte knew another woman.
Her name is Valérie Mareisse and shared the life of Thierry Lhermitte in the early 1970s. Also an actress, she made her debut in the troupe of Splendid. It was there that she met the man who would later become a figure of French cinema. “I had a kid’s character with a provocative body. I liked a lot. When Thierry Lhermitte met me, he confided to Gérard Jugnot: ‘I have just met the most beautiful woman in the world.’ Gérard, when he met me next, said he was a little disappointed. I replied: ‘No problem, I prefer to please Thierry than you’ “, confided Valérie Mairesse in the columns. of “Gala” in 2015. Before adding: “I found Thierry almost a little too nice. Young girl, I was a little bit bitchy”. Their relationship lasted almost three years. Three years during which the young couple went through difficult trials. Especially when Valérie Mairesse got pregnant and was forced to go to Holland to have an abortion. “Because it was forbidden in France”, recalls the main interested party. As a reminder, voluntary termination of pregnancy was legalized in 1975 thanks to the Veil law.
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See also: Thierry Lhermitte: his confidences on his rare disease