A theater man and a legendary coach. The actor and director Jean-Laurent Cochet died on Tuesday morning at the age of 85. He had trained the greatest French actors, from Isabelle Huppert to Gérard Depardieu.
"My theater teacher, Jean-Laurent Cochet, whose teaching has turned my life upside down, has left us (...) his teaching was amazing," tweeted actor Fabrice Luchini, one of his "nuggets" after the announcement. the disappearance of his theater master.
This morning, my theater teacher, Jean-Laurent Cochet, whose teaching has changed my life, left us. I was still talking about him the day before yesterday for an interview on the Fountain. His teaching was amazing #fabriceluchini pic.twitter.com/YSWzea2Rj3
- Fabrice Luchini (@LuchiniOfficiel) April 7, 2020Jean-Laurent Cochet, who died on Tuesday morning, was "hospitalized for five days at Bichat hospital" in Paris, his agent Laurent Grégoire announced to AFP, confirming information from Le Figaro . According to the actor’s entourage, he died of the Covid-19.
Joined the Comédie Française at 20
The theater has been the life of this actor, director and recognized professor. He has signed more than 150 theater productions, played more than 300 roles and, above all, for more than fifty years, transmitted his passion for dramatic art, forming Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert, Richard Berry, or Mélanie Thierry , thanks to the course that bore his name.
Born on January 28, 1935 in Romainville, in Seine-Saint-Denis, he entered the Comédie Française at the age of 20, where he really did his apprenticeship with his teacher, Béatrix Dussane. He will leave after eight years and 80 roles.
In 1962, he made his first appearances on television with the program Le Théâtre de la jeunesse by Claude Santelli. In the second half of the 1960s, he started directing and, in 1967, inaugurated the Jean-Laurent Cochet course, which quickly became a reference in the teaching of dramatic art.
Follower of classical theater
With a keen eye and a good-natured face, he explains that "the whole thing is not to act, to seek the absolute correctness of the verb". For him, the theater, “it's a profession that is worked.
Besides, after two weeks, the lazy people go away on their own, I don't even have to sort it out ”. His course, he chose not to reserve it for an elite but to open it, once a week, to the public.
A follower of classical theater, he continues to teach a style based on the need to breathe well, to work on attacks and finals.
"Talent does not exist"
He knows what he dislikes: " Star Ac, because they want us to believe that we learn everything in two months, the cinema where we make work actors who are not and all those directors who distort the texts ”. "Talent does not exist," he says again. Donations are sometimes dangerous because a gifted student tends not to work. ”
And it is acclaimed. First of all by Fabrice Luchini, the one of his pupils of whom he is probably the most proud. And who pays tribute to him: “At 22, I had just made two films. Serge Rousseau, famous agent, told me "it's good but you don't know anything about the job. You have to learn it, the only solution: go to Cochet". I left and there, the shock! I saw a man who occupied the space in a fabulous way. "
As for Gérard Depardieu, his teacher had remembered, he had arrived "at the Cochet course without ever having read anything". "At the beginning it was not that but Gérard wanted so much to learn".
Isabelle Huppert “especially remembers spending hours listening to her. I was fascinated, she says, by his manner of putting the words, of rhythm, of breathing the sentences (….) Each author with him became limpid. During her class, I was more of a spectator than an actress ”.
Cinema
“Venice Film Festival”: Fabrice Lucchini and Catherine Frot vying for the Golden Lion
Culture
Isabelle Huppert believes that actresses must be better “economically protected”
- Culture