Muriel Robin who was the student of the actor at the Conservatoire delivered the most moving speech, explaining how Michel Bouquet had saved her at a time when she wanted to “stop everything”.
Le Monde with AFP
A sacred monster of the theater hailed by Emmanuel Macron; The tears of Muriel Robin: a national tribute to the Invalides was paid on Wednesday April 27 to the actor Michel Bouquet, died April 13 at the age of 96.
“He burned the boards and punctured the screen for sixty years,” said the President of the Republic during the funeral praise, just re -elected, a few hours after having completed his first public outing since Sunday in Cergy ( Val d’Oise). “He reigned on the theater in sacred monster (…), he revealed unsuspected aspects, opened new breaches,” said the head of state, who was accompanied for his wife’s ceremony, Brigitte.
In the company of a dozen students from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art, where Michel Bouquet was a professor, he deposited white flowers at the foot of a portrait of the actor. Contrary to what had been observed during the recent national tributes paid to Jean-Paul Belmondo (2021) or Charles Aznavour (2018), the coffin was not present, Mr. Bouquet having already been buried on April 15, in the most Strict intimacy, in the native village of his wife, the actress Juliette Carré, in Yonne.
“I am your theater father”
At the ceremony, the actress was surrounded by other members of the family and names of the French scene and cinema, notably the actors Michel Boujenah, Catherine Frot, Fabrice Luchini, Pierre Arditi and Muriel Robin, who was Michel Bouquet’s student at the Conservatoire. It was she who delivered the most moving speech, remembering how Michel Bouquet had saved her at a time when she wanted to “stop everything”.
“I was 25 years old. You caught me in the flight with a few words that upset me:” I am your theater father “(…) Monsieur Bouquet, I tell you without emphasis: you undoubtedly prevented from dying and even more given to live, “she said. “Your tenderness tinged with modesty will never leave me. The king is dying. Not you, not you, especially not you,” she added, the strangled voice.
“When you played, Michel, you imposed, and what is very rare, something that is of the indisputable (…) nobody could replace you,” said Luchini. “Michel, you are the theater, and the theater never dies,” said Pierre Arditi. Unforgettable in the king is dying, of Eugène Ionesco – which he played no less than eight hundred times – and in the sting, of Molière, Michel Bouquet died on April 13.
Secret characters
He had also marked the cinema by playing an astonishing François Mitterrand at the evening of his life in the walker of Champ-de-Mars, by Robert Guédiguian (2005). This role earned him the César for best actor, after that received a few years earlier for Anne Fontaine’s film how I killed my father (2002).
On the screen, he will also have embodied secret characters in the films of Claude Chabrol (the unfaithful woman, in 1969), played under the direction of François Truffaut (the bride was in black, in 1967) and was a Magistral Javert, chasing Jean Valjean in the miserables of Robert Hossein (1982).
But it is for the theater that this giant of the scene displayed his preference, making known in France the work of Harold Pinter and putting himself at the service of great classical texts (Molière, Diderot or Strindberg) and contemporary ( Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus or Thomas Bernhard).
Born November 6, 1925 in Paris, son of an officer who became a prisoner of war, Michel Bouquet owed his taste for spectacle to his mother, who regularly took him to the Opéra-Comique. “Whenever the curtain got up, there was no longer the horror of the war, there was no longer the Germans around (…), the unreal world exceeded the real world far. It was The best teaching in my life, “he told the France-Presse agency in 2019.