For nearly forty years, Gérard Lanvin has spent happy days alongside Jennifer, the mother of his two sons, Manu, a musician, and Léo, who has become an actor. The 70-year-old actor can’t believe it. “It happened so quickly,” he admits in Paris Match. Always so in love, he even dedicated to the woman of his life a “love song” on the album he recorded with his son Manu and in which he whispers that “the magic of great love is to ignore that he can finish one day ”.
Yet when they meet in 1979, nothing suggests that these two will live and grow old together. Jennifer, whose real name was Chantal Benoist, then 25 years old, is a singer and model. She has just recorded a disco album Walking In Space which is a hit. For his part, the actor is separated from Dominique, who dumped him for the singer Renaud, and he continues the conquests. “I wasn’t trying to fix myself … And then she came in.” It was obvious, ”he confided a few years ago.
Obviously far from being shared at the outset. Before getting to know him in the flesh, the singer has a rather decided opinion on the actor. Claiming then to “detest” him physically, as Gérard reveals today, she would never have imagined one day falling into his arms. It is after seeing him in You will not have Alsace and Lorraine, a film released in 1977 and directed by Coluche and Marc Monnet, in which the actor plays the role of the white knight, that she draws this categorical opinion.
For those who sell second-hand clothes at the flea markets on weekends, this schoolboy comedy nevertheless marks the beginning of fame. But for Jennifer, who discovers it for the first time, Gérard is not an Apollo. It must be said that his outfit is worth the detour. Molded in a tights, white shirt open on a hairy chest where shines a heavy gold chain, long hair disciplined with brushing and thick black eyebrows, it has nothing to seduce the singer who evolves in the world of fashion.
She would even have found him so ugly on screen that she would have been pleasantly surprised to see him in real life. Discovering him without his ridiculous outfit and this outrageous makeup that hardened his features, she fell under his spell.
And 1984, they get married to become this fusional couple. Gérard admits that his wife “made him as a guy”, making him a “man and father”. By need of sun, the actor entrusts to Paris Match to have settled recently in Morocco with his “accomplice”, that he does not “want to disappoint”, he specifies.
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