“He was wonderful and rare”: the tender memories of Nathalie Baye on her love affair with Johnny Hallyday

Their story may have only lasted three years, Nathalie Baye and Johnny Hallyday have always remained linked. Madly in love from 1983 to 1986, the parents of Laura Smet lived their romance in the spotlight. “Johnny Hallyday was used to all this noise and to all these people around him”, says the actress in the columns of the Sunday newspaper. To avoid the media and the fans in Paris, they had their haven of peace. “When we lived in the house outside of Paris, the period when I was pregnant was particularly hard, remembers Nathalie Baye with our colleagues. We were happy in the Creuse. I have never even seen it as well as in the Creuse.” More than four years after the death of her daughter’s father, Nathalie Baye has fond memories of the Johnny Hallyday she knew.

“He was extremely shy, he had a real kindness about him. He was wonderful and rare. Johnny Hallyday was not what we imagined. He was much better than that“, she added, moved. And time will not have affected their complicity. Until the end of Taulier’s life, Laura Smet’s parents remained especially close. In the columns of Gala last June, the actress confided that she “keeps a wonderful memory” of their idyll, “a happy parenthesis” : “We were accomplices. We laughed a lot, despite our differences”. And if she remained friends with Johnny Hallyday “almost to the end”Nathalie Baye still regrets not having been able to see him as much as she would have liked “because of the complex situation that you know”…

Nathalie Baye: “He was extremely unhappy in his life”

With our colleagues from elsewhere, Nathalie Baye drew a portrait without appeal of the rocker at the end of his life. “In the last few years, he was extremely unhappy in his life. He was all alone, all day, in his office, with the television on. I had never seen him go so badly. He looked like the living dead . I was sad that Laura saw her father in this state.”, regretted Nathalie Baye with the JDD, without mincing words. In the columns of Point elsewhere, she remembered the battle he had led with force against the disease. “Physically, he was diminished. His body was just pain. But he never let go. From the beginning of September, the fight became very difficult, she remembered. His body was starting to fail him and the chemotherapy was no longer working. The disease developed very quickly.”