A documentary on Patrick Dewaere, directed by Alexandre Moix, is broadcast on France 5 on October 21, 2022. A powerful work, presented at the last Cannes Film Festival, which allows us to better understand the great actor and skinned alive that the artist was. Frenchman who committed suicide on July 16, 1982 at the age of 35. His daughter Lola Dewaere took part in this work and brings her intimate and poignant look at the tormented existence of the man traumatized by the abuse he suffered in his childhood, in the indifference of his mother Mado Maurin, who died in 98 years old in 2013.
Like his siblings, the actor started very early in the cinema, not out of passion but pushed by his mother Mado Maurin who then collected the actor’s fees with her second husband, Georges Collignon. In the documentary Patrick Dewaere, my hero, we can see how painful the relationship between his mother and him was, as reported by Le Figaro. She had not told him that he was the fruit of adultery, but he will learn it from his brother, thus obtaining the label of “the child of shame“. The one who gave him life also left him in the grip of a predator, he will then suffer the repeated abuse of a pedophile.
He had a bad relationship with his mother
A family story that lifts the heart of his daughter Lola. In Christophe Carrière’s book, the actor’s fascinating biography with subtitles the flayed, she had already broached this delicate subject in the preface. His actor father had “fucked up because he was raped when he was a kid and he had a bad relationship with his mother, Mado Maurin“. She had also entrusted to Paris here in 2014 having cut ties with his family: “They are special people. I cut ties with them. I did not go to the funeral of my grandmother Mado Maurin, who died last December.“
Two years later, Gérard Depardieu evoked this “truth” in his book of interviews, Living !. “I believe that, in his childhood, he had been the victim of acts of pedophilia. He told me about it but I don’t know if I have the right to say that. What I do know is that his fragility came from there. This childhood that did not pass was his abyss, his inner abyss“, underlined the actor about the hero of the bad son.