An icon. The 81-year-old French actress and singer has rocked the childhood of millions of children with her titles Pandi-panda or Bécassine. This Saturday, June 10, Bernard Montiel welcomed her on the set of the show "TPMP People" broadcast on C8. And if since the beginning of her career in the 60s all generations know her, her career in the song was not assured.
His particularly joyful titles actually hide a much darker childhood. Born in Saigon in Indochina in 1942 - which today happens to be Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam - she is the eldest of five siblings. At the age of three, she was forced to leave French Indochina with her family at the beginning of the conflict of independence. The presenter recalls that she "avoided certain death", to which Chantal Goya agrees.
"I was so revolted"
"My mother has always used us to fighting, even when we were little. She told us the truth, she said 'today it's going to be very complicated, your dad may be more there,'" she recalled. His father, Bertrand de Guerre, of Vosges origin, owned a rubber plantation in Vietnam. With the conflict of independence, the threat hung over the War family.
The then 3-year-old girl stood up to Vietminh soldiers as they went to the family home to arrest Chantal Goya's father. Already tied up by the militia, Bertrand de Guerre was finally released after an intervention full of aplomb by his eldest daughter. "I was so outraged that I said "They will never kill Daddy", while I was raised like that, "she mimed before continuing: "I saved my family and then we returned to France, in the Vosges".
