She has a lovely way of talking about her job, Brigitte Fossey. “It’s like the sea, the surf. I am fully there and then I disappear, I withdraw. I love this alternation,” she explains. After 70 years of career, the actress feels fulfilled. She looks back on her filmography with joyful wisdom, devoid of regrets. “All the roles I accepted, I wanted to do them. There are no small roles, only small interpretations. Sometimes they are brief but exciting roles.”
“My theater teacher told me: if you are afraid, you will age. If you’re not, you’ll never be old.”
The cult films in which she starred, she happily agrees to return to. “La Boum is not a film that bothers me. It was the comedy I had been waiting to do for a long time. It was my first comedy role in the cinema. A role that she almost did not accept, however, when Claude Pinoteau offered it to her, at the age of 32. “I said to myself: I have an 11-year-old daughter, I’m not going to play the role of a 13-year-old mother. I was incredibly coquettish and stupid. My theater teacher told me: if you're afraid, you'll age. If you're not, you'll never be old. You must be early. It was a trigger and since then I haven't cared about it. I don't care if I'm old or young, I do what you want, I gain weight, I lose weight for the roles. He was absolutely right. The roles happen inside, not outside.”
In the world of cinema, not always kind to actresses who are getting older, and the roles that fall to them, here again Brigitte Fossey takes a step back and defends an atypical position. “If there’s something coming through, you have to catch it even if it doesn’t match exactly.” And to quote the fable of La Fontaine's Heron: “Be careful not to disdain anything when you have more or less your account”.
“When I filmed in Forbidden Games, a lot of people wanted to grab hold of me, take me in their arms, cuddle me (…) I felt that it wasn’t normal.”
At a time when actresses are also speaking out about the violence suffered in the cinema, Brigitte Fossey knows she is relatively spared. “At the age of 5, when I filmed in Jeux Interdits, there were a lot of people who circled around me, like flies around a light, sometimes people wanted to get hold of me, They wanted to take me in their arms, they wanted to cuddle me 'give me a little kiss on the neck' and I felt that it wasn't normal. I answered. No and I said, I only kiss my mom and my dad. I don't know why, I've always been defensive. When I took up this profession at 18, it started again naturally, but I wasn't afraid… There were rules at home. The most important thing for my parents was to respect the children. ”
From her parents, perhaps also come the humor and enthusiasm that characterizes her. A father, an English and German teacher, taken prisoner during the Second World War. An era which experienced the bombings of Boulogne-sur-Mer. “Even during the war, they always kept humor,” notes Brigitte Fossey. “At peace, they discovered joy, gymnastics, theater. They were madly happy with nothing, rich in their ideal, in their need to celebrate life.”
Watch the entire show in replay here.
