It took the actor a long time to get rid of this addiction… Friday, June 28, 2024, Pierre Arditi was invited onto the set of the show Chez Jordan, on C8. In front of Jordan de Luxe, the actor revealed that he smoked a lot. “Too much but I stopped by myself without doing anything“he confided before specifying that he smoked between two and four packs a day. “Four when things were really not going well, otherwise two a day for sure!”he said.
A curious brunette, Jordan de Luxe, asked him how he did it. “When you don’t smoke, you can’t understand! Besides, I myself today, I don’t understand how I could have smoked all that. But I haven’t smoked for a very long time.”he slipped. When the journalist asked him what had triggered his quitting of cigarettes, the actor revealed that it was his cough.
Pierre Arditi: “I could hardly play without coughing”
In full transparency, the 79-year-old actor explained: “Tracheitis because I happened to play… For a very long time, I coughed when I was not in the theater. And then one day, I started coughing on stage. So, well, a little bit, it will pass and little by little it got worse and after that, I could hardly play without coughing. Besides, there is a spectator who once wrote to my friend Bernard Murat, who was the director of the Edouard VII theater, where I played a lot. He sent a letter in which he wrote: ‘Mr. Director, I really like Pierre Arditi, does he ever play without coughing?'”.
Facing Jordan de Luxe, Pierre Arditi then confided that he had been afraid of an illness that is incurable. “We smoke too much and it’s irreversible. When you stop smoking, I was always told: ‘You can go ahead, it goes back to normal!’ And after a certain number of years, it’s as if you hadn’t smoked. But there’s something that means that at a certain point, when you smoke too much, it necrotizes the lungs, It’s like you put tar on them and you die of suffocation.“he explained.
Pierre Arditi: “It’s worse than dying”
In 2002, for Le Monde, the star had already mentioned her addiction to cigarettes. “I was performing Joyeuses Pâques by Jean Poiret in the evening and, during the day, I was rehearsing L’Ecole des femmes by Molière for the creation in Avignon. I was in terrible pain. My doctor ordered a scan: ‘You don’t have cancer, but If you don’t quit smoking you won’t be able to play anymore‘. It’s worse than dying”he had revealed.
On Europe 1, Pierre Arditi confided about his voice: “It’s fifty years of smoking, there’s really nothing to brag about, but I stopped. It’s been nine months since I stopped smoking, my voice hasn’t changed and it’s a thousand times better like that.”.
