"He burned the boards and punctured the screen for 70 years", affirmed during the eulogy the President of the Republic, just re-elected, and a few hours after having made his first public outing since Sunday in Cergy (Val- of Oise).

"He reigned over the theater as a sacred monster (...) of our literary monuments, he revealed unsuspected aspects, opened up new breaches", underlined the Head of State who was accompanied for the ceremony by his wife. Bridget.

In the company of a dozen students from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art where Michel Bouquet was a teacher, he laid white flowers at the foot of a portrait of the actor.

Unlike recent national tributes paid to Jean-Paul Belmondo (2021) or Charles Aznavour (2018), the coffin was not present, Mr. Bouquet having already been buried on April 15 in the strictest privacy in the village of his birth. wife, actress Juliette Carré, in Yonne.

"I am your theater father"

At the ceremony, the actress was surrounded by other family members and names from the French stage and cinema, including actors Michel Boujenah, Catherine Frot, Fabrice Luchini, Pierre Arditi and Muriel Robin who was a pupil of Michel Bouquet at the Conservatory.

Actor Michel Bouquet playing "The King is dying" by Eugène Ionesco, directed by Georges Werler, on September 29, 2005 at the La Fleuriaye theater in Carquefou, near Nantes Frank PERRY AFP / Archives

It was she who delivered the most moving speech, remembering how Michel Bouquet had saved her at a time when she wanted to "stop everything".

"I was 25. You caught me on the fly with a few words that overwhelmed me: + I am your theater father + (...) Mr. Bouquet, I tell you without emphasis: you have me without doubt prevented from dying and even more given to live", she launched.

"Your tenderness tinged with modesty will never leave me. The king is dying. Not you, not you, especially not you," she added, her voice strangled.

"When you played, Michel, you imposed, and what is very rare, something which is of the order of the indisputable (...) nobody could replace you", declared Mr. Luchini.

"Michel you are the theater and the theater never dies," said Pierre Arditi.

Unforgettable in "The King is Dying" by Ionesco - which he played no less than 800 times - and in "L'Avare" by Molière, Michel Bouquet died on April 13.

Secret characters

He had also marked the cinema by embodying an astonishing Mitterrand on the evening of his life in "Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars", by Robert Guédiguian (2005).

This role earned him the César for best actor, after that received a few years earlier for Anne Fontaine's film "How I Killed My Father" (2002).

Actor Michel Bouquet posing in Paris, January 12, 2016 JOEL SAGET AFP / Archives

On screen, he also played secret characters in the films of Claude Chabrol ("The Unfaithful Woman" in 1969), played under the direction of François Truffaut ("The Bride Was in Black" in 1967) and was a masterful Javert, chasing Jean Valjean in "Les Miserables" by Robert Hossein (1982).

But it was for the theater that this giant of the stage displayed his preference, making the work of Harold Pinter known in France and putting himself at the service of great classical texts (Molière, Diderot or Strindberg) and contemporary texts (Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus or Thomas Bernhard).

Born on November 6, 1925 in Paris, the son of an officer who had become a prisoner of war, Michel Bouquet owed his love of performing to his mother, who regularly took him to the Opéra Comique.

"Each time the curtain rose, there was no longer the horror of the war, there were no longer the Germans around (...), the unreal world far exceeded the real world. That was the best lesson of my life," he told AFP in 2019.

© 2022 AFP