Guy Marchand: "I repeat my death, like that, it's almost done"

"With a hat and a beard, you can grow old underneath, you can't see it."

At Guy Marchand, everything is studied.

Life must be "light", even and especially at 84 years old, with gall bladder problems, a "shortness of breath" which prevents him, at this moment, from taking up his dumbbells and repeating the singing trick he dreams of. perform on stage his latest album, “Born in Belleville”.

But it turns, a lot.

Certainly to play people who are going to die.

It makes him laugh, in his large but very simple house near Avignon, without any apparent luxury, next to a farm where sheep graze. Far from the heart of the village, where we will follow him later, this Friday, October 15, in his 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air driven by his son, who does not go unnoticed on the way to the restaurant. Guy Marchand loves to eat, is fussy on the Tatin. But first, he likes to talk.

When we arrive at his home, in the middle of nowhere in the plain leading to the Alpilles, his son Jules, 32, who takes care of him a lot, bricks the Chevrolet in the garden. We see the actor of "Coup de torchon", "Garde à vue" or "Loulou", lying in a large armchair in the living room through the glass door. “I can sit there for hours doing nothing, dreaming,” he says. Two dogs are playing, one very large and one toddler. Everything goes in pairs: he had two horses on the ground behind, but he has just given them to a friend. He doesn't go up anymore. The singer has a dragging voice, a little sepulchral. “As I got older, it got more serious. It's good for acting. Less for singing: as the other said, it is in the treble that it becomes serious, ”launches this light baritone.

“My friends more talented than me are dead.

I occupy the niche "

Guy Marchand

This Wednesday, at the cinema, he touches as a grandpa suffering from cancer, the patriarch of a family where everything is going all out, between deceptions and children who grow up, in "Everything smiles on us", a modern marivaudage whose filming has perked up: “I loved it because in the films, there are often young people, not so young, and little by little they get attached to you. I am very emotional. What is fantastic is the letter I received afterwards: I

. A young guy I barely saw. Marvellous. I feel more real while playing. Even the dying. “My friends more talented than me are dead. I occupy the niche ”, he bluntly blurted out.

In "The Last Part", a poignant TV movie that TF 1 will broadcast soon, he plays the father of Franck Dubosc and the husband of Macha Méril, who chooses euthanasia. “I repeat my death. Like that, it's almost done. Besides, Macha taught me to die. She saw people disappear that she loved very much, including her companion (the composer Michel Legrand). I didn't know how to do it, we were in a hospital room. She said to me:

It's fantastic, the cinema! It makes you stupid at first, to take care only of your navel, but as you get older, you realize that it is something magical. To play, like the sorcerers in the tribes, who imitate life. It goes that far. "

At 84, Guy Marchand is living in a large house located in Mollégès, in the Alpilles.

LP / Fabien Malot

His eyes light up.

We ask him why live in this big house far from everything?

“I have always found myself in places without knowing why.

I grew up among the thugs of Belleville.

Afterwards, I followed my wives.

First a beautiful Bordelaise, who gave me two beautiful children, Jules, and Ludivine.

Two gifts.

Afterwards I followed a girl in the South who loved horses like me.

And then I lived with my beautiful Russian, but she moved to Berlin.

She is forty years younger.

I'm not going to piss him off.

It's all over.

This is the hardest part about getting old.

What could be more beautiful than a woman on the face of the earth?

"

One day crooner, always seductive.

"To please is a reflex," he smiles almost out of politeness.

On her desk, two photos of her young mother, with a sublime face.

“My whole life has revolved around a woman, my mother.

I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever met.

I was in love with her.

"

"It was time for me to shoot again, because we're broke"

Guy Marchand

The mother of the early years, the son of his old age. Jules, a young actor who has returned to help his destitute father who admits: "I don't know how to do anything, except to play between

and

". “He's my father, my brother, my boyfriend, sometimes my son,” smiles Jules, who cooks and takes care of everything. “Without him, I couldn't play anymore,” says Guy who keeps asking where he is. “My daughter, I missed her so small, I was not there. As I am fragile, she comes often, we met. Children are the truth. They love you the way you are. The son is going to build a small house in the garden, opposite that of the patriarch.

"It was time for me to shoot again, because we're broke," Guy swears. It's hard to believe it. “I won a lot of money on the

but I spent it all. Horses. Cars. The women. I liked to live widely. And I didn't have star salaries. I'm a tourist. "He remains complexed by his missing friends like Serrault and Noiret:" I loved them so much but I was always afraid to say too much bullshit, not to be perfect enough, ideal in their company. Noiret brought such peace to a shoot. "With Pialat, brilliant and angry filmmaker, in" Loulou ", he took full face, as evidenced by a documentary on the filmmaker broadcast on Arte this Monday evening. Guy Marchand bursts out laughing at this old memory: “At one point I left. What am I missing Pialat. He wasn't nice to me. I was leaving the army, I had a sense of honor. It's ridiculous, eh as a term. "

Guy Marchand and his son Jules in front of their canteen in the Alpilles in Mollégès.

LP / Fabien Malot

It's hard to imagine the king of slow “Destiny” in “Les Sous-giftés on vacation” in para.

He was, and took the Algerian War head-on.

His eyes darken.

“The military gave me a face on humanity that made me sad.

In Algeria, I saw that men were capable of doing incredible, unspeakable things.

In my childhood too.

We were a sacrificed generation, that of war.

When I went to the movies to see

in Belleville at the end of the war, with kids who bawled while waiting for their film or their cartoon, in the first part, at the News, we saw the excavators pushing corpses in Auschwitz.

At seven, it's a bit tough.

Engraved forever.

These are the things that have made me in life.

When I left the Guignol des Buttes-Chaumont, I saw the shorn women of the Place Armand-Carrel.

Even then, to talk to you about it, it moves me.

I saw this poor woman being brutally mowed, another with a child in her arms running, pursued by vociferous people.

My feminism also comes from there, to see women martyred for nothing.

Did they like a German?

And were we sure?

"

"Better to die in the grass than in your room"

Guy Marchand

Fortunately there is the Chevrolet 1954. It no longer works, it starts again, thanks to a spare part unearthed by a friend of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. “It's Ava Gardner's car, the aesthetics of the time, the curves. I don't like today's square cars. The smell, this dampness of the cushions, there is a pleasure, we drive elsewhere, in another era, we do not know who is next to you, if it is Gary Cooper. These are childish, cinematic fantasies, ”smiles the actor who sits next to his son.

In downtown Mollégès, Guy greets through the window, a passerby smiles. At the restaurant, he's cold. He lost weight as a result of his health problems. He goes on anecdotes as an aperitif. A knockout that the boxer put there more than half a century to a giant: “He was hurting me. At one point, I have a superb swing, a very fast left, you can hardly see it, and it's final. I saw a Norman wardrobe collapse. He's still alive, you know, and he lives around the corner. I met him. He told me that we had opened a boxing gym around here. I think he wanted to give me one before I was buried. "

As a cocktail, a bad fall from a horse in Uruguay and a gaucho who tells him: "Better to die in the grass than in your room."

"And the main courses, his film debut:" My first film was with John Wayne.

" True and false.

In "The Longest Day", he does not appear but jumps in a parachute and accompanies the stuntmen in the military zone.

He savored his snails - "I saw on TV that they were full of vitamins" - and returned to the Algerian war, more cheerful: "What I liked about Arab music."

"He mimics a story:" We had taken a grenade.

I walk into the night towards a car with two shadows inside.

I walk over, nervous, pulling out my 11-43 Browning.

They were lovers kissing.

Sounds like cinema, right?

And Guy Marchand, a novel.

EDITOR'S RATING: 3/5

“Everything smiles on us”