Died Sunday at the age of 81, academician Jean-Loup Dabadie, lyricist of hundreds of songs and screenwriter of cult films from the 60s and 80s, is unanimously hailed as an enchanting, benevolent, funny and subtle, of culture French of the Thirty Glorious.
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This eclectic man, entered the French Academy in 2009, who will have exercised his talents in literature, journalism, cinema and song for more than forty years, died Sunday at La Pitié-Salpêtrière. Twelve days after the actor Michel Piccoli, who had served his Things of life so well .
Carefully ordered white hair, a dazzling smile, Dabadie has been walking his dandy figure in the French cultural landscape since the 1960s.
"He was a complete artist, he had succeeded in all the arts: the sketch with Guy Bedos, the song with Polnareff and Julien Clerc, and cinema as a screenwriter and adapter," said his agent, Bertrand de Labbey.
The Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers (Sacem) sees him as an "insatiable lover of the language" . He had "the words to say it, and to make it say." All his life, Jean-Loup chiseled stanzas and verses, dialogues and aftershocks, humor and drama, prose and poetry ” .
“France loses an author with a thousand talents, unclassifiable and popular. The words of Jean-Loup Dabadie clearly and accurately expressed our feelings until accompanying every moment of our lives ” , tweeted the Minister of Culture Franck Riester.
His predecessor, the former minister of François Mitterrand, Jack Lang, sees in this "writer, lyricist, journalist, scriptwriter, dialogist" an "alchemist of words that dance" , "transforming words into melodies" .
Born in 1938 in Paris, Jean-Loup Dabadie, the son of a lyricist himself, had started out as a writer (from the age of 19 he published a novel) and journalist. He was to become an author of highly successful sketches, then a huge lyricist and a screenwriter noted for his texts full of tenderness and nostalgia.
"We will all go to heaven, especially him," said the chancellor of the Institut de France, former minister Xavier Darcos, taking up the refrain from his most famous song he had composed for Michel Polnareff.
César and Rosalie , All the boats , all the birds, The things of life , My preference are as many films or songs of which he was the author of the script or the lyrics, among his vast repertoire.
"Our memories are steeped in his sentences. With him we hum human wisdom, " added Mr. Darcos, who recounts having met him the last time in the courtyard of the Institute:" He said to me : '' every Thursday, coming here, I take the time to thank Heaven for my life, '' ”he told AFP.
His star in paradise
For Mireille Mathieu, he is a "fabulous author, screenwriter, great feather of the French variety" who "deserves his star in Paradise, he who wrote the most beautiful pages of things in life" .
"A few days after Michel Piccoli, another accomplice of Claude Sautet leaves," notes Patrick Bruel, thanking him for "these replicas that have so often guided our lives" .
Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival, underlined the place occupied in a profitable period of French cinema by the Sautet-Dabadie couple: “Dabadie filled the audience of French cinema in the 70s and 80s: women (Romy), guys, pubs, cars, weekends. Jean-Loup softened Claude's pessimism with soft writing and the delicious charm of a man gifted for happiness. ”
"So much talent for telling true emotions ..." , welcomed Pierre Lescure, the current president of the Festival, also emphasizing his very special role in the Seventh Art.
Dabadie had notably signed the script for films by Sautet including César and Rosalie and Les choses de la vie .
His last successes in cinema date back to the early 1980s. Jean-Loup Dabadie then seemed less in tune with his era. "The profession of screenwriter must be done in an infinite shadow" , liked to say this discreet who chiselled his lines. Jean-Loup Dabadie had just finished the adaptation for the cinema of a novel by Georges Simenon, The green shutters , whose first role was to be held by Gérard Depardieu.
Philippe Labro, who was in high school with Jean-Loup Dabadie, at the age of 15, concludes this tribute with these words: " The French lose the most brilliant, talented, subtle goldsmith of the word whose songs last for eternity . The journalist also insists on "his dazzling scenarios and dialogues" . “ All of this is written with a smile and elegance. "
