There are wounds that we never heal. That of Patrick Chesnais is one of them, the 75-year-old actor had to learn to live with it. It is about the death of his son Ferdinand, in October 2006. During a drunken evening, the son of the actor, aged 20, got into a car with a very alcoholic friend. Driving in the wrong direction on the Paris ring road, the vehicle hit another car, the young man died instantly. Since then, the actor has been dealing with this persistent pain, which he has put on paper twice, with the books Where is Ferdinand? Diary of an orphan father then Life is Beautiful. I’m dying to tell you!
In his last book, he returned to the burial of his son: “I saw him, lying forever in this box, just in front of me, carried by strong undertakers, calm, extinguished, definitely dead… I told myself that I should have protected him better and that it was me. who should have been in that box… I haven’t been a good dad. A good father prevents his son from dying at twentys.”
The very evening of the disappearance of Ferdinand, Patrick Chesnais decided to go on the boards. “The situation was on the edge, on the edge of everything, of distress, of death, of life going on. It’s like eating, pissing, sleeping, at some point it comes, it drips“, he confided in his book. The mother of the boy who was embarking on comedy was born Coralie Seyrig. The actor is also the father of Emily (born in 1984), whose mother is his wife Josiane Stoléru and of Victor qu he had in 2003 with Odile Roize.
And then there is the after. Patrick Chesnais created the Ferdinand Association, to try to raise awareness about drunk driving, a scourge that affects many young people, even if they are far from being the only ones. “Without wanting to play moral fathers, I try to fight against this completely illusory feeling of omnipotence, to devalue, to tarnish this image.“, he explained in the columns of the Parisian in 2013.