Host Jordan de Luxe collected the memories, anecdotes and other confidences of Jean-Paul Rouland on his show The Instant of Luxury 2.0this Thursday, February 3, 2022. The writer and media man, who had met the late Pierre Bellemare in the 1950s, remembered his friend whom he affectionately nicknamed Pierrot and his particularly trying end of life.
Happy to recount his long friendship with Pierre Bellemare, with whom he had started working on the radio, Jean-Paul Rouland still mourns the one who died in 2018. “He died of age. He had had stomach cancer. It is difficult to approach this sort of thing… He was no longer eating. It was consumed little by little. He died the day before my birthday. He died on the 27th, I was celebrating my birthday on the 28th. I was celebrating my 90th birthday, on stage at my home in Chesnay [dans les Yvelines NDLR], I then made his funeral oration. He was a friend, a true friend“, he said, not without emotion. Together, they had notably founded the production company Técipress, which provided for television and radio cult programs at the time such as head and legs, The right number or The Invisible Camera.
Pierre Bellemare, who had led an active professional life to the end and a very dense intimate life, had begun to gradually decline after several hard knocks in life, including a stroke in 2011 and a bad fall in 2017. In May 2018, his son Pierre Dhostel declared in an interview on the airwaves of Europe 1, after his father’s death: “This summer it was a little more difficult. When we went to see him in his Périgord, which he loved so much, he was already very tired and we felt that there he was going a little bit. But I think until the end he really loved his audience in an incredible way. (…) It’s a bit banal to say that, but he was someone irreplaceable and I’m sure that all French people are very moved and saddened by his disappearance.“
Watch the full interview at Youtube channel of Jordan de Luxe.