No more living in their shadow: younger sister of talented actresses and directors Maïwenn and Isild Le Besco, Léonor Graser has gradually revealed herself in recent months, when she has just celebrated her 40th birthday. Through her talent, she too: a sociologist, the young woman is an increasingly recognized author and notably collaborated on the autobiography of her sister Isild, Say truereleased several weeks ago.
A joint work which allowed them to reunite after several years of estrangement: separated when the young woman fell under the influence of Benoit Jacquot at 16, while her sister was in adolescence, they ended up “get back together” in recent years. Having both become in their forties and divorced mothers, they were also able to address their childhood traumas.
Traumas that they owe to an unusual youth: daughters of the actress and journalist Catherine Belkhodja but born to two different fathers, the young women grew up in a very poor apartment in Belleville and suffered the poverty and violence of their mother for many years.
A “free woman” and peaceful
A mother on whom all three spoke a lot but that our colleagues from Release wanted to ask questions to find out his version. Still as eccentric according to them, the sixty-year-old defended herself from all the criticism aimed at her: “I gave everything to my daughters, even if they are pissing me off today. I opened the way, broke social barriers, codes with men…“, she argued, before observing: “Léonor, like the others, is a brilliant and free woman.“
A brilliant younger daughter, recognized by a German physicist, son of a Nazi, whom she considered for a long time as her father, before learning that she was in fact the daughter of a son of a concentration camp survivor. And who quickly fled the family pattern: if she went through casting calls and obtained small roles when she was a child, like her two older sisters and her two brothers, there was no question of her entering the world of cinema, a “middle of ego, narcissism“.
Far from the cinema for a “healthy” life
Explaining to her mother that she wanted to do something else, she was initially rather poorly received: “First, Léonor declared that she wanted to be a housekeeper. I told him: ‘Go ahead, take a mop, I’ll show you how the bourgeois women will treat you’“, recalled Catherine Belkhodja. But Léonor did not let go of her need to escape her mother’s desires. And leaving home at 17, she took on odd jobs and participation in writing. scripts, columns or even books to continue your studies up to a doctorate in sociology.
Now divorced from an educator from a family “simple, healthy, loving“, and mother of their son Paceo, born in 2014, the young woman is delighted to have found her sister and confides that “with this book, [elles se sont] rewelded“. And if relations are still very difficult with Maïwenn, she has no doubt, it will come back. At least, we hope for them…
