On the César stage, this Friday, February 23, Judith Godrèche delivered a poignant speech on her experience as a young actress abused by directors.
“For some time now, I have been talking but I can't hear you, or barely.
Where are you, what do you say?
A whisper, half a word, that would be enough,” she told the audience.
A powerful text which triggered a long standing ovation from the audience at the Olympia.
In the audience, the cream of the 7th art but also his 18-year-old daughter, Tess Barthélémy, who recently took her first steps in the cinema.
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In the series
Icon of French Cinema
, directed by Judith Godrèche and released in December, Tess Barthélémy plays Zoé, a teenager attracted to a choreographer older than her, and whose mother is an actress wishing to reinvent herself after a Hollywood exile.
A scenario directly inspired by the story of Judith Godrèche, she who denounced the “control” and sexual abuse of directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon.
If Judith Godrèche has today decided to break the silence, it was her daughter who was the trigger.
“If a 40-year-old man approaches my daughter, I will kill him,” she assured in the columns of
Elle
at the beginning of December.
“It's because I have a teenage daughter that I manage to realize what happened to me, to tell myself that I navigated in a world without rules or laws.
I left school at 15, the stories we read, the films we saw, everything promoted this image of Lolita, of baby doll.”
Before concluding: “We must tell young girls to be careful.
You can get caught in the net of a more powerful person, and art is an extremely favorable springboard for that.”
A pitfall that she will certainly watch out for, since her daughter seems tempted by a career in cinema.
Expatriation to California
Born on April 19, 2005, Tess Barthélémy is the fruit of Judith Godrèche's romance with the director and ex-member of the Robins des Bois troupe, Maurice Barthélémy, as a couple from 2004 to 2012. When her parents separated, the young girl leaves to settle with Judith Godrèche in Los Angeles.
There, her identity as “daughter of” is not known, which allows her to live in complete normality.
Even if this forced her to grow up far from her father, who remained in France.
To manage the relationship at a distance, Maurice Barthélémy admits to having “made sure to be present despite the distance”.
“Since the age of 7, we have been working via video.
She is 15 years old today.
But ultimately the distance allowed me a rare emotional closeness,” he declared in 2021 in the columns of
Public
, as reported by Gala.
Like her parents, young Tess is creative and attends an artistic school in California.
“She did four hours of dancing a day, wrote, took theater classes,” explained Judith Godrèche in an interview with
Madame Figaro
in December.
It is therefore quite natural that the teenager finds herself on screen at the age of 12, in
Not Very Normal Activities
(2013), directed by her father.
A few years later, in 2018, the actress landed a new role in the film
Under the Eiffel Tower
by American Archie Borders, alongside her mother Judith Godrèche.
Which recently gave him the leading role in its series
Icon of French Cinema
(broadcast on Arte at the end of 2023).
For the director, her daughter had everything to portray the character of Zoé, this teenager in search of emancipation: “She has the advantage of being bilingual, which is what I needed,” Judith Godrèche told
Madame Figaro
.
“But she did tests to reassure herself about her abilities.
It’s very important, for her and her identity as an actress, that she feels legitimate.”
Coming to promote
Icon of French Cinema
on the set of the show “Quotidien”, on December 12, Tess Barthélémy was questioned by Yann Barthès about her view of her mother's acting career.
And the young woman's response surprised the host since she claims to have never seen a Judith Godrèche film.
“My mother never wanted me to see any of her films (...) She didn't want my brother [
Noé Boon, born from his marriage with Dany Boon, Editor's note
] and I to idealize him,” said -she explained.
“French films aren't shown on TV too much there... I didn't have any friends who knew my mother.
It was when I returned to France this year that I received a few more comments, not necessarily negative.”
All the more so, we imagine, since Judith Godrèche lifted the veil on the abuse of which she says she was a victim at the start of her career.