Fanny Ardant
Photo: NOTICIAS DEL ESTE
DAUGHTER OF A COLONEL AND SPECIALIST IN SURREALISM
Fanny Ardant was a girl from a good family. Her father, a cavalry colonel, worked as a military attaché in Sweden or as an advisor to Prince Rainier’s personal guard in Monaco (they were friends of the prince). Fanny traveled through Europe with her parents, but everywhere she had excellent schools: her father and mother tried to give her the best education. As a result, she entered the Institute of Political Sciences of Aix-en-Provence and graduated from it, at the age of 22, defending her thesis on “Surrealism and Anarchy”. Only after that did she decide to become an actress: she entered theater school and began acting on stage in plays based on Racine and Corneille. She played her first film role in 1976, when she was 27 years old. She and she became famous throughout France in her thirties, starring in Nina Kompaneets’ television series “Ladies of the Coast.”
Among the spectators was François Truffaut, who by the late 1970s had earned the reputation of being the first French film director. Along with him, her daughter watched the first episode of “Ladies” and later recalled: “The father was delighted, simply delighted with Fanny Ardant.” In fact, Truffaut fell in love with the actress at first sight. And he gave him the lead role in the movie “The Neighbor”, the idea of which he had been developing for several years. For the lead role, he previously mentally named other actresses he was in love with (and mutually): Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau. But it was only when Fanny appeared that she took this project seriously.
Still from the movie “The Girl Next Door”
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
Ardant attended a party held at the luxurious Parisian restaurant Fouquet’s after the upcoming César Award (the triumph was Truffaut’s film “The Last Metro,” which won ten awards). He sat at a table with Gerard Depardieu, Truffaut saw them together and exclaimed: “These are my lovers!” He was referring to the main characters of “The Girl Next Door,” Bernard and Mathilde, who loved each other passionately and then broke up dramatically. Eight years later, when Bernard married and Matilda married, they met, their romance flared up with renewed vigor and ended rather cruelly.
Still from the movie “Six” (1986)
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
The romance between Fanny and Francois also ended sadly. She managed to film it in another movie, the black comedy “Jolly Sunday,” and then she started having severe headaches; Doctors first diagnosed a migraine and then began to think about a stroke. But as it turned out, Truffaut, 51, had a glioma, a malignant brain tumor. He jokes: “Even after my second film, critics said the director was not right in the head!” He underwent emergency surgery, but at first the diagnosis was not revealed. And they certainly didn’t say that he had only a few months to live, even despite the surgeons’ intervention.
Meanwhile, Fanny was pregnant. At that time she already had a daughter with the actor Dominic Lever, but she was invaded by an “almost uterine desire” to become a mother again. Truffaut’s daughter was born shortly after her father, who had undergone surgery, left the hospital. The girl’s name was Josefina. In her final months, Truffaut saw her frequently. And in the last few days, Fanny did not leave her bed (Madeleine, Truffaut’s first and only official wife, kept her company).
Fanny Ardant and François Truffaut
Photo: NOTICIAS DEL ESTE
“THE ONLY THING I BELIEVE IN IS LOVE”
A few years later, in 1989, Fanny gave birth to another daughter of the Italian cameraman and director Fabio Conversi. But she never married. In an interview with The Guardian she explained it this way: “The main reason I didn’t get married was because my mother and father truly loved each other and we were the perfect family. I think I was afraid of not reaching this level! To me, a happy marriage is something we should bow down to. A real intimacy between a man and a woman, a real family in which you can laugh and argue, is like Notre Dame Cathedral or Westminster Abbey: a masterpiece. But this is difficult to achieve… When I read the summary of the script for “The Girl Next Door”, I was deeply struck by the idea that you can die of love. The only thing I believed in in my life, even at the risk of sounding sentimental, was love. If I’m sitting at a dinner party and I’m bored, I will definitely ask the man sitting next to me, whether he’s an ambassador or president of the republic: “Do you love your wife?” This is the only interesting topic!
Frame from the movie “8 Women”
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
However, his acting work is a very interesting topic. She rose to fame thanks to Truffaut’s films and quickly became one of the first French actresses. Another important director, Alain Resnais, willingly and extensively filmed her, acted with Costa-Gavras, Ettore Scola, Volker Schlöndorff, Agnès Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Patrice Leconte, François Ozon, Franco Zeffirelli, Paolo Sorrentino and appeared in “Sabrina” with Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford and “Elizabeth” with Cate Blanchett. In 1997 she received the well-deserved César Award for the comedy Evening Outfit. She herself began to direct films, for example, “Stalin’s Divan”, in which Joseph Vissarionovich was suddenly played by Gerard Depardieu, an old friend of Fanny. By the way, she does everything to protect him from any attack. And she says that she “has a feminine side, a surprising sophistication and intelligence; She is not at all a macho bully, although she sometimes seems arrogant.”
However, Fanny pointed out in the same interview that men in general for her are “protective, intelligent and charming. I admired my father, my grandfather, my uncles, my brothers… So I never understood what feminists were talking about. On the other hand, I always wanted to be free. But she didn’t need freedom directed against men, but freedom for me!
French actress Fanny Ardant turns 75
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
THE MOST FAMOUS FILMS
“The Girl Next Door” (1981)
“Joyful Sunday” (1983)
“Beyond the Clouds” (1995)
“Mockery” (1996)
“8 women” (2002)
“You are silent forever” (2002)
“Paris, I love you” (2006)
“Rasputin” (2011)
