InterviewEvery Sunday, “Le Monde” questions a personality on a decisive moment in his life. This week, the actress with 150 roles, a committed feminist, looks back on the discovery of literature, which has nourished her since childhood.
Since 1954, Françoise Fabian has not stopped playing in theater, cinema and television, zigzagging between Molière, Rohmer, Lelouch or recently the series Ten percent. After a first record in 2018, she is preparing new shows and dreams of going around the world. “I decided that I was still 55 years old”, says this octogenarian.
I wouldn’t have made it here if …
… If there hadn’t been the reading. It has been and remains my food. As a child, I read all the time, day and night, because I was already an insomniac. My father had a very large library. I drew a lot of plays there, Shakespeare, Molière, Corneille, but also Mein Kampf, Communist books, the Countess of Segur, Dostoyevsky… Sometimes I would break down in tears: “It’s so beautiful! All this made me invent a lot of stories. I transported myself to my readings. I locked myself in the cabinets to be quiet, to read and speak. My mother would exclaim, “What are you talking about in there? Go outside ! ” I stayed. I also spoke a lot at night, to the despair of my sister, whom I kept from sleeping.
What did you imagine?
I invented another life for myself, romantic, full of dangers. I imagined that I was not the daughter of my parents, but a foundling, that I had to go… I was a heroine, out of a fiction, and I still am. I dreamed that I was an archaeologist, or an architect. I have also created in my head two or three very beautiful houses. In particular, a house on stilts, on the banks of the Rhône, which looked like an open oyster, all glazed. There was an elevator for cars. This house is in front of me there as I speak to you. I am very sensitive to involuntary memory. Suddenly, I see, I feel something that transports me to another life. Like Proust with his madeleine. A smell, a sound, a word can take me back years.
How far ?
Until Tipasa, this city, suburb of Algiers, where I was born and where my grandfather ran the Hôtel de France. I still remember the taste of the mandarins that I ate, one day, sitting in a swimsuit on a sidewalk, with my cousin Alain. This basket of mandarins, I still carry it with me, I still eat it. Another time, I was alone on the beach at nightfall and I saw three tall guys coming towards me. I repeated to myself: “I will not be afraid, I am not afraid. “They passed, and I still see myself saying to myself:” I was not afraid “.
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