“This film is totally me”

Françoise Fabian is an actress inseparable from both theater and cinema due to the diversity of her roles in these two fields. She is showing, from Wednesday December 8, the first film, by Aurélie Saada, Pink. She plays a widow who decides to live life to the fullest.

franceinfo: Pink is a film that shows the importance of being free. Are you free ?

Françoise Fabian: Completely and I claim it. Always, yes.

It has always been with you. Were you already like that as a child?

Yes. My father called me ‘the little general’ because I wanted to rule everything in the house. I was unbearable, but I liked literature very much and I liked working very much. I was playing the piano. I was doing a lot of things.

You started with the Algiers Conservatory. You played musical instruments and that’s what you really wanted to do in the beginning.

Yes. At the beginning, I wanted to be an architect because I liked architecture a lot, but at that time, you had to do math to be an architect and I was very bad. I was very fond of literature and my father had a very large library. So I got to know Molière, Shakespeare, all the authors around the age of 12, 13.

What made you want to be an actress then?

In Algiers, where I was born, the acting lessons were given on the same floor as the piano lessons. My first flirtation was with an actor who took me to his class with a teacher, Madame Gragné, whose photo I still have at home. She tells me : “Do you know texts? Do you like texts?“I answer him: Yes, I like it a lot.”Could you tell us something?“No. There are all the students, I’m not going on stage,”But yes, take the stage and tell us what you want“and I told her a poem by Baudelaire. She found that I had a good voice. She said to my father:”I am ready to give her acting lessons without you having to pay because she is gifted and I would love to have this girl in my class“. I did a year with her and then she wanted to introduce me to the Paris Conservatory and she asked my father to make the sacrifice to separate from me. I was 18 and I was received.

In this film by Aurélie Saada, Pink, you play as a woman who loses her husband whom she adored and you yourself have been very touched by the men in your life, you lost them very young.

Yes. I have had the good fortune in my life to know three exceptional men. My father: exceptional. Jacques Becker: exceptional, with whom unfortunately I have never worked. We didn’t have time because he died four years after our marriage. And then I lived 25 years with a man I loved very much, Marcel Bozzuffi, whom I had the misfortune of losing thirty years ago and whom I have never replaced.

Is he really the man of your life?

Yes. Always. Of my life, of my dreams, of my daily life, of my nights.

Precisely, was it hard to play this role in relation to your past that you have, because there is a lot of you in this woman?

A lot, but precisely, there is all this energy that I also have to have to overcome all the trials and to have to continue and move forward.

“I have the energy to overcome hardships because I’m someone who doesn’t complain, I just get by with it.”

Francoise Fabian

to franceinfo

Aurélie Saada, the director of the film, says that this film makes you want to age. You tell yourself that above all it makes you want to live.

It looks like me. It’s extraordinary this film that Aurélie wrote, it’s completely me. I have sunk a few times in my life. I sank, but since I had a job that I loved a lot, my passion saved me. Truly. Because I was in terrible pain. Moreover, I campaign and I say it on the radio, I campaign for the chosen euthanasia. Because it’s awful, I saw my father die in a terrible state, alive, undead. And that, I do not want in any case to undergo it nor to make undergo it to the people that I love.

This woman also fights injustices, does not support them. You are like that and besides, as soon as we talk about you, we obviously think of this signature of the Manifesto of 343 that you know well and which advocated the right to abortion.

It must be said: “343 bitches”! We were called ‘bitches’. I knew Gisèle Halimi and Simone Veil well, I also worked with them. When the abortion law was repealed, I gave a speech like that to tell my own story. To say that, all the same, abortion was essential.

I have the impression that your gaze is a transparent gaze. How hard it is for you to hide things.

I am fair, I am benevolent. My father taught me kindness. Maybe that’s what makes me look at things with benevolence, with benevolent criticism.

“What I fully claim is benevolence.”

Francoise Fabian

to franceinfo

Finally, how do you see this course?

I want to continue. It is not closed to my gaze, it is open to the rest.