She had been consecrated by the film Red Kiss in 1985 and, above all, she had made public her HIV status and her heart transplant problems: actress Charlotte Valandrey died on Wednesday July 13, her agent and her family announced to Agence France-Presse (AFP). She was 53 years old.
She revealed her HIV status in 2005 in her autobiography, love in the blood, a big bookstore success (180,000 sales) then adapted into a TV movie. Her triple therapy had exhausted her heart and she had recourse to a transplant in 2003, which made her the first HIV-positive heart transplant patient in France. In 2008, she suffered a heart attack, her heart stopping beating for twenty-two seconds.
Recently, she had announced on social networks that her second heart was coming to an end and that she needed a new transplant. “Waiting for my third”she wrote on Instagram on June 8. “On June 14, Charlotte had to have emergency surgery to replace her ‘second-hand heart’, as she called it, but this new transplant did not take, this third heart did not live”explained his daughter, his sister and his father in a statement sent to AFP.
In 1985, the film “Rouge Baiser” made her a star
Charlotte Valandrey was not yet 17 when she left Red Kiss, the film that made her a new star. She embodies, in France during the Cold War, Nadia, a young rebel who militates in the Young Communists and sees her ideal waver after a romantic encounter with Stéphane (Lambert Wilson).
He was then predicted a destiny à la Sophie Marceau. It was a few days before she turned 18 that she learned that she had contracted HIV. With a “gothic prince”member of a famous rock band, she will only say.
She is not selected for white wedding (1989) by Jean-Claude Brisseau, after having shared the secret of his illness with the director. His filmography is then far from the glory that he was promised. Her career is mainly on television: from 1991 to 2000, she plays in the series Les Cordiers, judge and cop (up to 11.4 million viewers); from 2017 to 2019, she played judge Laurence Moiret in tomorrow belongs to us.