Pierre Arditi says it and repeats it: after 36 years of love, he is still as happy with his wife Evelyne Bouix. While he recently told his love at first sight, he often likes to declare his love to her. They never had children together but the actor raised like his own daughter Salomé, whose father is Claude Lelouch. His son, Frédéric, was born in 1969 from a first marriage.
But what we know less is that the actor – starring in the new France 2 mini-series What Pauline does not tell you – also shared his life with a legend of French song: the great Barbara. At the time, Pierre Arditi was in his thirties, Barbara was almost 45 years old. Their affair remains secret for a long time but still moves the actor, who had mentioned it on the show All in good timepresented by Stéphane Bern on RTL.
“I shared the intimacy of this woman for a few months. It was wonderful“, he had started, specifying that he had kept the secret on this idyll because “it’s [s]has private life“.”You know, it’s life, it’s like that, we meet, there was a sort of rather dazzling encounter. I passed through the life of this star, quite briefly in the end. But it marked me forever“.
A moment in his life”beautiful and striking“, which still moves him today, to hear his voice knotted.”I was lucky enough to have this relationship all to myself for a few months, here it is“, he explains, “the torn soul” by the voice of the singer, when he hears it. A moment that he wanted to keep preciously in him so as not to forget it.
Barbara died in 1997, aged just 67, her body tired from the dozens of medications she took to treat her voice and her many anxieties. Very modest about her life and her dark periods, she never appeared with Pierre Arditi. Her only known husband, Claude Cluys, shared his life between his 23 and his 32 years, during the period when she was in Belgium and had become friends with Jacques Brel.