Notice to those who would like to lock her up in a cage, in a box, in a well-sealed box, in a predetermined role: Judith Chemla will always escape. Escape is what the actress, musician and singer did, to flee the domestic violence inflicted by her ex-companion, actor and director Yohan Manca, sentenced to eight months in prison suspended in May 2022. On July 6 of that same year, she took the floor, on France Inter, to tell what she had suffered, and to enjoin women never to withdraw their complaints against violent men.
In a media system like ours, and at a time when omerta is finally cracking on these issues, this speaking out has earned her a celebrity beyond measure with that which she had acquired thanks to her talents as an actress and as an opera singer, yet recognized since her debut. Today, we find them shining with happiness, both in The Great Magicthe film by Noémie Lvovsky (released February 8), that in Melisande, the musical show that director Richard Brunel and musical director Florent Hubert adapted from Debussy’s opera (to be seen at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, in Paris, from March 9). Judith Chemla will also be in A winter in summerthe new film by Laetitia Masson, which will be released on March 22.
Of all this, art and life, which for her have always gone together and sent disturbing echoes back to each other, of her roles as an actress free as a bird and of being caged by the a man who claimed to love her, she speaks with a passion and a force that contrasts with her diaphanous twig demeanor. Life and art mingled from the outset in her, born in 1983, who is the daughter and granddaughter of violinists, and to whom her father and grandfather transmitted “their unalterable love and emotion in the face of music and beauty”.
A full-fledged artist
Judith Chemla studied piano and violin for years, before discovering theater in college and never leaving it, immediately won over by her ability to “create a hole in the middle of reality, a space to dream, reinvent and question the world”. At 15, she completed an internship at the Théâtre du Soleil, tirelessly admiring the ability of Ariane Mnouchkine’s actors to “improvise, research, invent, build, in a mixture of freedom, humor and hard work. It was exactly what I wanted, she specifies: to be a real actor-creator, as Mnouchkine knows how to deploy them”.
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