Macron pays tribute to Michel Bouquet

(Paris) A sacred monster of the theater hailed by Emmanuel Macron, the tears of Muriel Robin: a national tribute to the Invalides was paid on Wednesday to the actor Michel Bouquet, who died in mid-April at the age of 96.

“He burned the boards and punctured the screen for 70 years,” said during the eulogy the President of the Republic, just re-elected, and a few hours after making his first public outing since Sunday in Cergy.

“He reigned over the theater as a sacred monster […] of our literary monuments, it revealed unsuspected aspects, opened up new breaches”, underlined the Head of State who was accompanied for the ceremony by his wife Brigitte.

In the company of a dozen students from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art where Michel Bouquet was a teacher, he laid white flowers at the foot of a portrait of the actor.

Unlike recent national tributes paid to Jean-Paul Belmondo (2021) or Charles Aznavour (2018), the coffin was not present, Mr. Bouquet having already been buried on April 15 in the strictest privacy in the village of his birth. wife, actress Juliette Carré, in Yonne.

“I am your theater father”

At the ceremony, the actress was surrounded by other family members and names from the French stage and cinema, including actors Michel Boujenah, Catherine Frot, Fabrice Luchini, Pierre Arditi and Muriel Robin who was a pupil of Michel Bouquet at the Conservatory.

It was she who delivered the most moving speech, remembering how Michel Bouquet had saved her at a time when she wanted to “stop everything”.

“I was 25 years old. You caught me on the fly with a few words that overwhelmed me: “I am your theater father” […] Mr. Bouquet, I tell you without emphasis: you have undoubtedly prevented me from dying and even more given to live, ”she said.

“Your tenderness tinged with modesty will never leave me. The king is dying. Not you, not you, especially not you,” she added, her voice strangled.

“When you played, Michel, you imposed, and what is very rare, something which is of the order of the indisputable […] no one could replace you,” Mr. Luchini said.

“Michel, you are the theater and the theater never dies,” said Pierre Arditi.

Unforgettable in The king is dying by Ionesco — which he has played no less than 800 times — and in the miser of Molière, Michel Bouquet died on April 13.

Secret characters

He had also marked the cinema by embodying an astonishing Mitterrand on the evening of his life in The Champ-de-Mars walkerby Robert Guédiguian (2005).

This role earned him the César for best actor, after that received a few years earlier for Anne Fontaine’s film how i killed my father (2002).

On screen, he also played secret characters in Claude Chabrol’s films (The unfaithful wife in 1969), performed under the direction of François Truffaut (The bride was in black in 1967) and was a masterful Javert, chasing Jean Valjean in Wretched by Robert Hossein (1982).

But it was for the theater that this giant of the stage showed his preference, making known in France the work of Harold Pinter and putting himself at the service of great classical texts (Molière, Diderot or Strindberg) and contemporary (Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus or Thomas Bernhard).

Born on November 6, 1925 in Paris, the son of an officer who had become a prisoner of war, Michel Bouquet owed his love of performing to his mother, who regularly took him to the Opéra Comique.

“Each time the curtain rose, there was no longer the horror of war, there were no longer Germans around […], the unreal world far exceeded the real world. It was the best lesson of my life,” he told AFP in 2019.