This Friday, October 21 in a documentary broadcast on France 5, Lola Dewaere unearthed love letters from her parents. Her father, Patrick Dewaere, had harsh words for Elsa.
With Elsa, Patrick Dewaere will have lived one of his most beautiful love stories. But will also have precipitated his fall. This Friday, October 21, France 5 broadcast an exceptional documentary directed by Alexandre Moix and told by Lola Dewaere, the daughter of the actor who died in 1982. In this one, she tells how her parents met. “You met my mother one evening at your house. She was going out with one of your brothers. A look, an obvious fact, she was 18 and you were 31”, says Lola Dewaere. After their love at first sight, Patrick Dewaere and Elisabeth Malvina Chalier got married in 1980 and then welcomed their darling daughter. “She left everything to live with you, together you shared everything, your excesses, your madness”continues the actress.
Patrick Dewaere, madly in love with his wife, wrote her many letters unearthed by their daughter. Letters that are sometimes very raw, as when he wrote to her: “I love you and I will fuck you”. But everything very quickly fell apart between the parents of Lola Dewaere. Tired of her husband’s self-destructive inclinations, Elsa fell in love with Coluche. It was from her home in Guadeloupe that she and her daughter learned of the suicide of Patrick Dewaere in July 1982. “Mom called you. You talked to each other, she told you that she couldn’t take any more of the drugs, of all that… And then you guessed for her and Coluche“remembers Lola Dewaere, who was only three years old, in this documentary presented at the last Cannes festival.
Lola Dewaere: “My father, a heroin addict, had dragged her into his addictions”
“He told her that the woman he loved was in his arms and ‘poor bastard, stop calling, you’re pissing us off'”, also explained a friend of Patrick Dewaere. And Lola Dewaere to add: “The lies, your childhood, the violence of life… You took a rifle, […] you sat on your bed, facing the mirror, you slipped the cannon into your mouth”. On the 8:30 p.m. set on Sunday, Claude Lelouch remembered the last hours of Patrick Dewaere and that phone call that changed everything. “We were preparing the life of Marcel Cerdan and Edith Piaf. He was happy, overjoyed, overjoyed. In the morning we had shot in the Bois de Boulogne. And then there was a phone call during the lunch that changed everything”, said the director.
“At one point, he came to me and he said to me: ‘Listen, I have a little emergency’. I didn’t know he was going to end his life. And impossible to predict, he came like that, during lunch”, continued the filmmaker. Her childhood, Lola Dewaere spent it with her mother, also addicted to drugs. “My father, a heroin addict, had dragged her into his addictions, from which she was then trying to get rid of. I saw her stuffing herself with methadone, little pink pills that she peeled off every morning.”, she remembered in the columns of Gala. Shortly after her father’s suicide, her mother was overwhelmed by the debts left by him, so the little girl was entrusted to her grandparents until she was 12 years old.