“Life is a game. A cruel game, but a game.” We share a corner of an umbrella with Josiane Balasko in the corner of a porte-cochère, watching the rain fall. A cruel game? For any explanation, she shows the busy world. In front of us: life. Behind: a theater on the boulevard, where, at 71, she continues to take refuge, going up on stage every evening in a new play she has written: A chalet in Gstaad.
We shoot at our butts. Two packs a day, all the same, she laughs. “But I crap, I don’t swallow the smoke, I shoot it. Except that, of course, there are some who enter ”, put into perspective the one whose father died of lung cancer when she was 14 years old. Josiane Balasko smokes, puts on a packet of peanuts, bites her nails (“The day I quit I started tearing my hair. All in all, I told myself that it was better not to have nails than to be bald. “). Everything rather than succumbing to fear.
“The great thing about the theater is that you come up with a headache, you tell yourself that you’re not going to be able to act, and then you do it, and the pain disappears when you perform. This is theater therapy… ” She sighs. “My anxiety is having a heart attack on stage. I can’t do this to them. “
No worries: the actress has resilience. Fifty-year career, a hundred feature films, an iconoclastic mix of popular cinema (a quarter of his filmography has exceeded one million viewers) and auteur films, including the pretty Tralala, musical by the Larrieu brothers, or The Attachment, by Antonin Peretjatko, expected in early December. “It says that I survive, she sums up with a happy pout. That I hold the shock. I’m not too topspin, not too botoxed, you can still take me for a 65-year-old woman, if you know what I mean. “
Red suburb
The Nathalie of Tanned, the pharmacist of Grandpa is resisting was the unforgettable faller of Too beautiful for you the seductive lesbian Cursed grass or the cantankerous janitor of the Hedgehog. She was Duras, Dolto, will soon be – if the project is successful – Angela Merkel for Thierry Lhermitte… Not to mention the eight films and a few plays that she has signed… “Yeah, that’s what being an actress is, it’s controlled schizophrenia. And then, if I don’t do anything, I get bored. In a bistro, you always have to wipe a glass, even when it is very clean. ”
Josiane Balasko: “The bistro is a spectacle. People make entries there like at the theater ”
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