Gérard Jugnot, Christian Clavier, Thierry Lhermite and Michel Blanc all met in the 1960s, on the benches of the Pasteur high school in Neuilly. It was also there that they met Tsilla Chelton.
A pillar of French cinema has left. Actor Michel Blanc died following a heart attack on October 3. With Josiane Balasko, Thierry Lhermitte, Christian Clavier, Gérard Jugnot, Marie-Anne Chazel and Bruno Moynot, he formed the Splendid, a troupe which left its mark on French comedy.
From the theater trilogy of Tanned, Santa Claus is trash, Grandpa is resisting… Before achieving success, the Splendid began on the benches of the Pasteur high school in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine).
It is here that Gérard Jugnot, Christian Clavier, Thierry Lhermite, and Michel Blanc met in the early 1960s.
“We weren’t hooligans”
Michel Blanc entered sixth grade in this single-sex establishment in the upscale neighborhoods in 1963, without coming from a posh background, unlike Christian Clavier and Thierry Lhermitte, and like Gérard Jugnot. In the quartet, a meeting occurs between Clavier and Jugnot, both in fifth grade, during a party in 1965.
“I was screening my first film, Plombfinger, a parody of Goldfinger in which I played Jean Bon 007. Christian, who, at the time, perfectly imitated our German teacher, like Louis de Funès, introduced me to Thierry Lhermitte, a son of a wealthy bourgeois in revolt against his environment,” Gérard Jugnot told Le Monde in 2016.
Then Michel Blanc enters the dance. “My first connection was Jugnot in third grade. I remember our first meeting very well,” remembered the interpreter of Jean-Claude Dusse in the columns of Le Parisien.
“We sat next to each other and started the stupidity competition. “We weren’t hooligans, but we passed little phrases under the table to make our friends laugh. At the end of the German lesson, the teacher looked at us and said: ‘Both of you, never together again!’ It was prescient.”
Between theater club and MJC de Neuilly
Among the four friends, Gérard Jugnot is the driving force, as told by the INA. “Gérard had this idea of doing theater for a long time, cinema and shows. We followed,” said Thierry Lhermite in the 80s, while Christian Clavier added: “Jugnot was very determined to do it, we did It’s just for fun.”
Michel Blanc and Gérard Jugnot therefore began in high school to cut their teeth at the high school theater club, while Thierry Lhermitte and Christian Clavier preferred the more experimental courses at the MJC in Neuilly. “That’s where we really played together,” explained Gérard Jugnot to Le Parisien.
The Pasteur high school in Neuilly is also the place of another fundamental meeting in the creation of Splendid, that with Tsilla Chelton. This theater teacher, who will become the famous Auntie Danielle in the eponymous film by Etienne Chatilliez, sparks a stir among the four young people the day she comes to give a conference on theater. Blanc, Jugnot, Clavier and Lhermitte will even end up taking his classes after the baccalaureate.
If the four friends from Neuilly met Marie-Anne Chazel, who was attending a girls’ high school just opposite theirs at that time, the meeting with Josiane Balasko took place a little later, leading to the official creation of the café. Le Splendid theater, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, in 1974.
Upon the announcement of the disappearance of Michel Blanc, the members of the Splendid troupe expressed in a press release their “immense pain at the death of their friend and companion”.
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