“A luxury hen”: this embarrassing moment for Nathalie Baye at the start of her career

Nathalie Baye is undoubtedly a big name in French cinema and it is not his fifty-year career that could contradict this fact. Known as much for her important roles as for her love story with Johnny Hallyday, with whom she became Laura Smet’s motherthe actress has mostly toured with the greatest directors of the last five decades of French cinema.

Nathalie Baye “I could barely look at myself in the mirror, it looked like a luxury hen”

It is said that we always remember his first appearance on the big screen, and this is the case for Natalie Baye. In 1971, the young actress was in her final year at the conservatory, as she confided to Télé Poche, and after having passed “four or five American-style auditions, where [elle]had passed before a skewer of decision-makers as in court” she had finally been chosen to appear in a film of Robert Wisethe director of West Side Story. In this film, titled “Brief meeting in Paris” the young Nathalie was going to give the reply to the immense American actor of the time, Peter Fonda which she qualifies however “unsympathetic”.

So for the purposes of this scene, “one minute on screen and three lines”in which she played the role of a girl who flirted with the hero in a nightclub, while he was “constantly watched by his fiancée” that the actress had to go to a Parisian hairdresser. She remembers “as my character had to wear a kind of blond sauerkraut, the production had sent me to a great hairdresser on avenue de Matignon, and when I left I could barely look at myself in a mirror: it looked like a luxury hen.” An experience that probably marked the actress for life!