In 2016, the Théâtre de La Colline revived one of his very last plays dissecting, this time, the Bettencourt affair. Philippe Lançon then had this definition from the playwright Michel Vinaver: “modest and ironic Sophocles of the Company, old green young man without academician’s dress”. The man who led a double life for nearly thirty years, executive then director of Gillette and playwright, died on Sunday at the age of 95. It was his daughter, actress Anouk Grinberg, who announced it to AFP.
The son of an antique dealer and a lawyer, Michel Vinaver – Grinberg of his real name – first wrote two novels before coming to the theater in 1955, two years after his hiring at Gillette. “I had ruled out from the outset to depend on my literary production to live”, he told AFP in 2015.
His first plays Corean people – created by Roger Planchon in 1956 – and the ushers have nothing to do with the executive life of this father of four children, including Anouk Grinberg. “I had set myself a ban: not to talk about me and my work”, he told AFP. After a few parts, it’s the breakdown. “I came out of it by lifting this taboo”. He writes Overboard : the story of the absorption of a French family company by an American multinational.
From then on, the company took a central place in the work of the man who would be nominated three times for the Molières and winner of the Grand Prize for Theater from the French Academy in 2006.
Thereby, Works and Days takes place in the service department of a coffee grinder manufacturer. In Job Application, the main character is an unemployed executive. In the ordinary, Entered in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française in 2009, the president of a multinational, his wife, his secretary and four vice-presidents survive a plane crash in the Andes mountain range.
When Edwy Plenel, co-founder of the site Mediapart at the origin of many revelations on the Bettencourt affair the approach for an adaptation, Michel Vinaver judges the affair “too abundant, with too many events, characters”. But he is caught up in the intrigue and the passionate relationship between Liliane Bettencourt and her daughter Françoise, “characters of ancient tragedy” according to him.
Result : Bettencourt Boulevard (created at the TNP in Villeurbanne), a mille-feuille of family intrigues, devouring jealousies, corruption at all levels. With the great story in the background: Liliane Bettencourt’s father, Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal, cultivated collaborationist friendships during the war, and Rabbi Robert Meyers, grandfather of Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers’ husband , deported to Auschwitz.