It's hard to guess, when he saw Pierre Arditi arrive on the set of "C à vous", that the actor suffered on stage at the end of September "a slightly strong vagal malaise", to use his words. The 78-year-old actor was invited Friday night on France 5 to evoke the TV movie Clemenceau, the strength to love, on the last years of the life of the Tiger, broadcast Monday on France 2. "First of all, a little note to tell you about our friendship," Anne-Élisabeth Lemoine told him as soon as she entered the set.
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"Death to Rest"
"It touches me a lot, on your part and on that of many people," replies Pierre Arditi. I didn't think at that point about touching others. I've always dreamed of being a popular actor, and I'm finding that I really am. It's a claim to fame for me." Anne-Élisabeth Lemoine is surprised: "Did you doubt it, honestly?" "I don't know if I doubted it or not, but I didn't realize it at that point. Something bad is good...", smiles the actor, who has acted in films with Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch and Bertrand Blier.
These health concerns led Arditi to cancel performances of his play Lapin. But if he had to "take his foot off the gas", there was no question of him retiring. "I'm going to have all of death to rest! There's no such thing as retirement for actors. Retirement is death. Unless there's an accident or memory problems, it doesn't exist," he says before delivering an amusing imitation of a cacochymous old man. He is expected to return to the stage in the coming days.
The actor details the reasons for this accident which, he admitted, gave him the "scare" of the moment. "It's covid that's responsible for all this, it's caused a number of projects to be telescoped. Especially Nicolas Bedos' series." A series "that we don't talk about, but we're wrong," says Pierre Arditi.
Entitled Alphonse, it revolves around the adventures of a father, played by Jean Dujardin, and a son, played by Jean Dujardin, who share the same job as gigolo. Released on the sly on October 12, this fiction did not benefit from any promotion. Amazon Prime Video wanted to avoid a bad controversy, while Nicolas Bedos is under investigation for rape.