4:00 p.m., July 12, 2022
Unknown to the general public, who nevertheless identified her in the series A wonderful family (TF1), Béatrice Agenin has never ceased to chain roles in cinema, television and theater. “So nobody really knows who I am”, laughs this invariably young and pretty septuagenarian. From the boards of the Comédie-Française where she played from 1974 to 1984, to the stagings of Robert Hossein and Bernard Murat, she rubbed shoulders with all registers and many legends.
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The cinema did not give him great gifts, however. She did not insist: “I don’t have a photogenic physique. InItinerary of a spoiled child, I played a very beautiful scene [la mère du personnage de Jean-Paul Belmondo]. Claude Lelouch cut it during editing… It wasn’t for me. » Belmondo leaves him better memories on the boards at the time of Kean or Cyrano de Bergerac. “With him, it was champagne every Sunday at the Marigny, what joie de vivre! Just before taking the stage in the fifth act of Cyrano, he always found time to tell me dirty stories. »
A recent adventure
In Our little cabaret, which she created this summer in the Off, with Émilie Bouchereau, her singer daughter, Béatrice Agenin is having fun. She intones The Amazing Tango by Marie Dubas and, in the next minute, says magnificent extracts from Proust, Colette… From Racine, she reproduces a famous tirade of Phèdre en rap! Intrepid, the actress likes to take risks. She nevertheless remains a demanding literary person, faithful to her classics, able to discourse on hours of Marivaux, of whom she praises “the theater remained extremely contemporary”.
The Off Avignonnais remains a recent adventure for her. In 2014, she arrived there for the first time by directing Sugar Lake, a dark play by Lee Blessing, which she made known in France with the help of her physician husband and, for the occasion, translator. When she returns to Avignon in 2019 with Mary of the Hens, governess at George Sand’s, it’s a triumph. It earned him the molière for the actress in a private show the following year. A coronation all the more deserved as it was she who initiated the project by proposing to Gérard Savoisien to write about George Sand. “Initially, I imagined a monologue relating to Sand’s work, not this text on the fate of her employee. But Gérard does as he pleases and he was right. »
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Upon arrival, Béatrice Agenin plays two roles: Marie Caillaud, known as ” chickens “, the little peasant girl promoted to governess, and George Sand, her famous patroness. Arnaud Denis, her director, plays her the role of the writer’s son, who has an affair with Marie. The play brings back the dialect of Berry, which fills the actress: “As a child, I lived in Paris but I spent every summer in Berry, the region where my parents were born. I learned to make hay and cider there, I improvised my first roles there, farmer, cowboy. I loved it, I understood the patois. » This patois that his father mastered and willingly echoed in public. “If I do this job, it is linked to this man, night worker at the Messageries de la presse Parisienne, but also an outstanding storyteller. The theater attracted him, he had practiced it in the army. He liked to read poems and make the gallery laugh with his Berry accent. » She also pays him a brief tribute in her Petit Cabaret.
Meetings
Nevertheless, it is once admitted to the French, in 1974 on leaving the National Conservatory, that Béatrice Agenin believes that she has found her real theater father, Jean-Paul Roussillon. He staged it several times alongside Michel Aumont in Molière, Marivaux. “An extraordinary actor and director! Today, I put on all my shows thinking of him, of his rigor in dissecting the texts, questioning the situations, grasping the states through which the characters go. He made everything clear and epidermal. »
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The theater does not open out every time!
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A school in gold whose excellence Béatrice Agenin measures, retrospectively. Throughout her career, she does not hide it, she has not always met people of this level. “With Roger Planchon, for example, I did not fall at the right timeshe explains. I played Elvire in Don Juan with Gérard Desarthe at the TNP. It was a period, at the end of the 1970s, when we wanted to break the codes. Planchon did not read the play in depth, he put it at the service of his visions as a director. I didn’t understand anything anymore, I couldn’t find my way around and I suffered from it. The theater does not open out every time! »
“Our little cabaret”, at Coin de la Lune (3 p.m.), and “Marie des Poules”, at La Luna (6:30 p.m.), until July 30 in Avignon. offavignon.com
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