Sacred monster of French cinema, Jean Reno no longer counts the successes in which he has played. Leon, Wasabi, The Big Blue. The 74-year-old actor has been filming since the end of the 1970s. Filming during which he has also had to manage an illness for more than 20 years now. “sly”.
It was in 2017, during an interview for The Express, that the friend of Laeticia Hallyday evoked his diabetes. “I have type 2 diabetes which is often detected around the age of fifty”, he confided in the columns of our colleagues before giving more details. “I inherited it. I had, as doctors say, predispositions, but you always think you can get through everything. You know human nature: ‘People die, but I don’t'”. “I was hoping to escape the disease. In this sense, when it fell on me, I did not expect it”, he added.
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A disease difficult to bear
According to him, “psychological shock” would have started it all. “As far as I am concerned, it was my second divorce. You think you are living normally, then one night you get up several times to urinate, you are always thirsty, you feel very tired, a possible drop in acuity visual”, said the actor. If, at first, the sidekick of Christian Clavier did not take his illness seriously, his body ended up calling him to order. What pushed him to take a heavier treatment. “A year and a half after its onset, I started, in addition, to inject myself with insulin to regulate my blood sugar.”
Although he is no longer in hiding, Jean Reno hesitated for a long time to talk about his illness. “I won’t tell you that I didn’t hesitate. A long-term illness like this can be perceived as a defect that one prefers to keep quiet for fear of being rejected. Even more so when you are a public figure. And then no, I decided to do the opposite and talk about it. When I became diabetic, by confronting myself with others, I quickly understood how privileged I am once again.“, he explained before concluding: “Diabetes is not a shameful pathology. We must make the French aware of its weight – millions of patients affected, it’s not nothing – and its dangerousness – we can die from it.”
VB