Popular artist with many talents, Jean-Loup Dabadie died Sunday at the age of 81 years. He will have built in thirty films and a few hundred songs a tender and nostalgic universe that sticks to the memory of the French.
The academician, who was a national lyricist from the 1960s to the 1980s, died at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, from a disease other than Covid-19, his agent Bertrand told AFP. from Labbey.
“César and Rosalie”, “All the boats, all the birds” “The things of life”, “My preference”, “We will all go to paradise”, are all tubes of which he is the author.
Carefully ordered white hair, a dazzling smile, Dabadie, lyricist and screenwriter, writer and journalist, has been walking his dandy figure in the French cultural landscape since the 1960s.
“Musician author” for the singer Julien Clerc, “cinema novelist” for the director François Truffaut, he practiced writing and laughing on command without compromising on quality.
Immediate success
Born in 1938 in Paris, Jean-Loup Dabadie, whose father was also a lyricist, published his first novel, “Dry eyes”, at 19 years old. He then started in journalism and could have become a “serious” author, if he had not sent his first sketches – “Paulette”, “The boxer” – to the comedian Guy Bedos during his military service.
The success was immediate. Soon followed by his first hits for Serge Reggiani (“The little boy”) or Michel Polnareff (“Ring à ding”). Since then, this workaholic (and tennis) fanatic looking dilettante had hardly stopped writing in over forty years: songs, scripts or plays …
“French quality”
In cinema, his name is associated with films stamped “French quality” from the 1960s to 1980. And it was with the director Claude Sautet that he experienced in the early 1970s his most auspicious period for a magic hat-trick: “Les things of life “,” César and Rosalie “and” Vincent, François, Paul … and the others “.
He would then supply several generations of singers in tubes. Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand, Michel Sardou … With, again, two major meetings: Michel Polnareff, for which he wrote a hymn to shared happiness, “We will all go to paradise” or his “Letter to France”, and Julien Cleric, with whom he will work on a dozen albums.
The France of Dabadie is that of the friends in the films of Yves Robert, “An elephant that deceives enormously”, “We will all go to paradise”, which triumph in the 1970s. That also of the gruff tenderness and the battered family in “La gifle” (1974) with Isabelle Adjani and Lino Ventura.
An average France. With the economic crisis, unemployment, the ruptures in the background. A world of drifting business leaders, dismissed executives, young beginners and broken couples.
Discreet
A France of friendship, essentially masculine. A tender and joyful universe, strewn with gags, in line with the great screenwriters of French cinema. His last successes in cinema date back to the early 1980s. Jean-Loup Dabadie then seemed less in tune with his era.
“The profession of screenwriter must be done in an infinite shadow”, liked to say this discreet who chiselled his lines far from the noise of show business.
Elected in 2008 and received the following year at the French Academy, Dabadie had just completed the adaptation for the cinema of a novel by the Belgian Georges Simenon, “The green shutters”, whose first role was to be held by Gérard Depardieu .
ats, dpa
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