This October 10, 2022, the talented actress with the singing voice Ariane Ascaride celebrates her 68th birthday, an intense life marked by cinema and by a man at her side for four decades. The actress has indeed been in a relationship since the 1980s with the same man, the French director Robert Guédiguian! Together, they collaborated on eighteen films, among which Marius & Jeannette, which won her the César for best actress, and Gloria Mundi released in 2019.
In the columns of Sunday newspaper in 2019, Ariane Ascaride returned to her meeting with the famous committed filmmaker. It was on the benches of the faculty of Aix-en-Provence that she met the famous Robert Guédiguian. Activist within the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), she demonstrates all her talent as a speaker to brief newcomers. After his performance at the podium, a young man approaches him. “Well said”he said. “I knew I had spoken well, I didn’t need his consent! I looked at my girlfriend and said, ‘Who is this jerk?'” She then discovers the name of the one who awkwardly tried to compliment her: Robert Guédiguian.
The latter had exposed his experience of their meeting at the JDD also : “I agreed with her speech so I went to congratulate her.” She looks at him “from above”, “doubting his sincerity”. The one who “wore a flowered shirt and a cap, with outrageously made-up black eyes” take it for a “flirty”. But after their hasty first impressions, they discover the same passion for politics and human rights. Seeing her on stage – she entered the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris to follow the courses of Antoine Vitez and Marcel Bluwal -, it is then “crushed by love“.
Parents of two grown daughters
The sequel is a rich filmography that they wrote together. In 1980, the former communist militant played the one who became his wife in his first feature film, Last Summer. The couple are parents to two daughters aged 38 and 31. In the magazine Pep’s in 2014, the discreet and sunny Ariane Ascaride confided in their offspring: “We are lucky with their father to have established a relationship of total trust, they tell us a lot of things and when there is a problem, we are the first ones they call. We tried to raise them with the values of the world we come from, and I don’t think we did too badly!”