Michel Vinaver, playwright and ex-entrepreneur who had notably transposed the Bettencourt affair to the theater, died this Sunday in Paris, his daughter, actress Anouk Grinberg, announced to AFP. He was 95 years old.
Nominated three times for Molières and winner of the Grand Prize for Theater from the French Academy in 2006, – Grinberg of his real name – has for nearly 30 years used the caps of director of Gillette and playwright.
He first wrote two novels before coming to the theater in 1955, two years after his hiring at Gillette. “I had ruled out from the outset to depend on my literary production to live,” he told AFP in 2015.
His first plays, “Les Coreans” – created by Roger Planchon in 1956 – and “Les Huissiers” have nothing to do with the life as an executive of this father of four children, including Anouk Grinberg. “I had set myself a ban: not to talk about me and my work,” he told AFP. After a few parts, it’s the breakdown. “I came out of it by lifting this taboo”. He wrote “Overboard”: the story of the absorption of a French family company by an American multinational.
From then on, the company takes a central place in his work.
When Edwy Plenel, co-founder of the Mediapart site, the source of many revelations about the Bettencourt affair, approached him for an adaptation, Michel Vinaver first judged the affair “too abundant, with too many events, characters” . Caught up in the intrigue and the passionate relationship between Liliane Bettencourt and her daughter Françoise, he finally wrote for the theater “Bettencourt Boulevard” (created at the TNP in Villeurbanne), a mille-feuille of family intrigues, devouring jealousies, corruption on all floors.