Maintenance“I wouldn’t have arrived there if…” Each week, “Le Monde” questions a personality about a decisive moment in their life. The actor looks back on his revelation for the realization and on his friendship with Jean-Paul Belmondo.
The actor of BAC North, ofFarewell Mr. Haffmann and sense of celebration, who is also the screenwriter and director of Big Bath, has gained in stature in recent years in French cinema. At 49, Gilles Lellouche plays a more exhausted lawyer than life in the film Goliathby Frédéric Tellier, released in theaters on March 9.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
… If I hadn’t had this wonderful French teacher, Patricia Brasseur, who revealed a passion in me that I hadn’t suspected. I was 12, I was in 5and, at the very strict Jeanne-d’Arc-Saint-Aspais private college in Fontainebleau (Seine-et-Marne). Instead of letting students learn Molière’s texts flatly, Ms.me Brasseur appointed two or three to perform a scene the following week on the blackboard. I was a very shy child. My little world was drawing in my room. I haven’t slept all night, the day before I was to play Scapin. I was transfixed with fear. When I started to play, the students started laughing, the teacher looked at me in amazement. Then she made me play every two weeks and even organized, for the first time, an end-of-year show. I understood the power of words, the power of laughter on others. This woman changed my life.
Have you kept in touch with her?
I surprised him by coming to his last class before retirement. The students absolutely did not understand what I was doing there! We cried in each other’s arms. I invited her to previews, she sends me text messages, she has very sweet words.
During your young years, you navigated in different universes. You have gone from a residential suburb, in Essonne, to the chic countryside, very close to Fontainebleau…
Yes. I first lived in Savigny-sur-Orge (Essonne). From the house, near the highway, we could hear the noise of cars. It was happy, despite everything. Mom was sunny, optimistic. In her twenties, she had been a singer. Probably that unconsciously she diffused a desire to be an artist in my brother Philippe [devenu acteur et metteur en scène] and me. My father was a repatriate from Algeria, an autodidact who was in turn a builder, jeweler, director of one company, CEO of another. Then unemployed for a long time, before getting his head out of the water as an accountant.
During a prosperous period, we landed in a Norman manor, on the edge of the forest in Montigny-sur-Loing (Seine-et-Marne), near Fontainebleau. It was the countryside, I went to good schools, with bourgeois classmates. But me, I came from the suburbs, I had infiltrated the world of rap, of the hip-hop movement that was emerging in the 1980s. I chose the minority camp, the kids from the surrounding cities – Avon, Nemours, Melun… I loved going to school, but I messed around all the time and was very dilettante. I was neither insolent nor arrogant, let alone violent. The teachers liked me. But I was expelled from quite a few private high schools without a contract. I was a little rebel. Angry to have seen my father damaged, the baseness of the gaze of others when your family is falling apart socially.
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