this day when his daughter Pauline was found dead “by chance”

It is a tragedy that deeply upset her. In 1957, the French public discovered Bernadette Lafont in The Mistons by Francois Truffaut. The actress then quickly became a key figure and highly coveted by New Wave cinema, in particular by directors such as Claude Chabrol, who made her appear in The Handsome Serge and The Good Women, Costa-Gavras, Georges Lautner, Louis Malle or even Philippe Garrel and Michel Drach. Despite her success, the actress did not hesitate to put her career on hold in order to take care of her family, in particular her three children: Elizabeth, David and Pauline. It is moreover the latter’s disappearance which will be the origin of the most striking intimate drama in the life of Bernadette Lafont, who died in 2013, and would have celebrated her 84th birthday on Friday October 28, 2022.

While following in her mother’s footsteps at the cinema, the 25-year-old young woman died suddenly in 1988. It was in August of that year that Pauline Lafont decided to head for the Cévennes for the time a summer with his brother David, in his mother’s family home. August 11, she goes alone for a hike, her relatives imagining that she will return for a festival in Switzerland, where she is to receive a prize. But at the end of the afternoon that day, Bernadette Lafont gives the alert, while she has no news of her youngest daughter. For two days, no less than twenty gendarmes, a helicopter and forty firefighters are mobilized to find her. His brother will even file a complaint against X, on August 16, for “arbitrary arrest and kidnapping”.

Pauline Lafont identified by a ring

The press then seized on the affair, evoking many rumors about the young actress, such as a retirement in a convent, a flight to China, an entry into a sect, or even a suicide after a long depression. Wacky and trying theses for the family of Pauline Lafont, who will finally learn his death on November 21, 1988. That day a shepherd discover his body “by chance” at the bottom of a ravine at a place called L’Adrech, in the town of Gabriac. Almost reduced to a skeleton, Bernadette Lafont’s daughter is identified by her ring and teeth. The autopsy establishes that his death is accidentaland occurred after a ten-meter fall that killed her instantly. “Saved” by the comedy of her own confession, Bernadette Lafont tried somehow to overcome this painful ordeal, “with great strength, joy”according to his friend Jean-Luc Moreau.