the sadness of the theater world after the death of Michel Bouquet – Liberation

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–Actors, filmmakers and directors who have directed Michel Bouquet or been his student describe to “Liberation” a “humble” actor and an extraordinary teacher.–

“He transmitted to us the taste of the theater as a major art”

Denis Podalydès, student of Michel Bouquet at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in 1987

“Each former student of Michel Bouquet has a sentence that serves as a viaticum. Mine, which has always accompanied me, was: “Denis what you have there…” He was patting my head:It has to come back down into your flesh.” He was a mixture of extreme tenderness and austerity. Always with the idea that he had to put his students at the feet of authors with a capital A, like at the foot of a mountain. And the author of all was Molière. The great task was to work Molière like a peasant works a very rich but arid soil, very difficult to dig. Sometimes he punctuated a scene that had just been presented to him by a lapidary: “Call author.” Which meant we had to work a hundred times harder. He meditated on his job in front of us, and I liked that a lot. We had one out of three or four sessions with him, and otherwise, we worked with Georges Werler who assisted him.

“He never talked about staging. There was only the text, the author. And between him and us, he wanted nothing to come between us. So much so that he taught us the autonomy of the actor. We could, we had to work alone, which is always tricky. The staging was not far, according to him, from dressing or affectation.

“He arrived at the theater at 4 o’clock in the afternoon – we didn’t say 4 o’clock – he slept in his dressing room. And looking at the ceiling, he played his whole role slowly. The actor’s brain fascinated him. He loved the theme…

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