It’s time for confessions. Nathalie Baye agreed to look in the rear view mirror of her very wealthy life for a portrait of the JDD. And the popular actress, now 74 years old, thus evoked her career in the cinema, her private life but also some of the fights that she carries discreetly. In addition to ecology and the defense of animals, the four-time Caesarized star defends the right to die with dignity. She was deeply marked by the death of his mother, Denise Coustet, victim of cancer metastasized to the brain.
In 1993, Nathalie Baye saw her mother admitted to the Parisian hospital of Pitié-Salpêtrière, because of her cancer which made her suffer excruciatingly. Installed in a room with three beds in a row, Denise Coustet is going through an abominable end of life. “I lived in fear that my mother would hear and understand the moans, the sounds of painthe conversations of patients and families around her“, recalls the actress of the films Just the end of the world, Haute couture or The Guardians. Appalled by the fate of her mother, Nathalie Baye then implored the doctors not to persist, knowing very well that the end was near and that her mother was suffering needlessly. “I begged them. I almost rolled on the floor to get them to release my mother from all her pain. The next day she was dead“, adds the actress.
Nathalie Baye has been fighting for the right to euthanasia and justifies herself thus: “I am against any form of therapeutic relentlessness. When the time comes, I won’t put my daughter through [l’actrice Laura Smet, née de son histoire passée avec le défunt chanteur Johnny Hallyday, ndlr] this that I suffered.“But if Nathalie Baye is in favor of the right to die with dignity, there is little chance that she will take the fight to the public authorities. The artist claims to be a centrist on the left but refuses to say for whom she is voting or to bring media support to such and such a candidate, not feeling legitimate for that.
The full interview with Nathalie Baye can be found in the pages of Sunday newspaperedition of August 7, 2022.