Charlotte Valandrey died on Wednesday July 13 at the age of 53, a month after a new heart transplant. Discover the very first attempts of the actress at the age of 15, which will lead her to the prize list of the Berlinale with “Rouge Baiser”.
“Anne-Charlotte Pascal – 15 years old – 1m59”. We are at the beginning of the 80s, the future Charlotte Valandrey, then in second class, makes her first tests in front of a camera. One is immediately struck by the spontaneity (Oh it’s okay, I’m not dressed as a nun!”), the magnetism and the intensity of the actress, who imposes herself in a few minutes as a potential “new Sophie Marceau”.
The sequel will be Rouge Baiser. Charlotte Valandrey plays Nadia, a fifteen-year-old young woman, an activist in the Young Communists in the early 1950s, who will question her ideals when she falls under the spell of a press photographer (Lambert Wilson) and the his mother’s former lover returns from the USSR where he was imprisoned and tortured. Released in November 1985 in France, the film brought together more than 740,000 spectators in theaters.
In this autobiographical feature film by Véra Belmont, where we also see young Elsa Lunghini and Isabelle Nanty, Charlotte Valandrey delivers a remarkable performance. She also received the Interpretation Prize at the 1986 Berlin Festival (ex aequo with the Brazilian actress Marcélia Cartaxo for A Hora da Estrela), before being nominated for the César for Best Female Hope.
Charlotte Valandrey will learn of her HIV status at the same time, a secret she will keep for almost twenty years, before revealing herself in the book love in the blood (2005) about her illness and the heart transplant she underwent two years earlier. Having become an essential figure on the small screen between her roles in Cordier, Judge and Cop and Tomorrow belongs to us, Charlotte Valandrey died on July 13 at the age of 53, a month after a new transplant which had not taken .