Comedian Pierre Palmade, sentenced to five years in prison, two of which are closed on Wednesday, became a pariah after the serious car accident caused under the influence of drugs.
On February 10, 2023, getting behind the wheel after three days of using drugs without sleeping, the actor, then aged 54, crashed into a car driving in the opposite lane and caused three serious injuries within the same family.
During the trial on Wednesday, the comedian, appearing very marked, “asked for forgiveness from the depths of (his) being” from the victims.
This highly publicized accident, which led to a cascade of revelations about his addictions (alcohol, narcotics, “chemsex”), revealed the dark side of a popular comedian, although a little out of fashion, who had been performing for 30 in his fight against his existential terrors.
The general public discovered with amazement an artist who had been unable to work for several years as he was mired in his drug addiction, dropping out of detoxification treatments and riddled with debts amounting to 250,000 euros.
A cocaine user since he was 20, Pierre Palmade had fallen two years earlier into 3-MMC injections, an even harder and more addictive synthetic drug that boosts sexual desire.
For 17 months and his nightclub outing in Bordeaux which made the rounds on social networks and outraged France, Pierre Palmade has been abstinent.
“I rediscover the simple pleasures of friendship, of family, of waking up in good shape, of writing personal thoughts,” assured the artist, who does not plan to one day return to the stage but is “looking for a way to convey a message about drugs, a message of recovery and hope.”
After the accident, his loved ones initially kept silent. His friend, the actress Michèle Laroque, who was his scene partner, spoke six months later of his “immense grief”: “Everything I had to say to him, I told him, and I will continue. But it remains between him and me.” Muriel Robin has definitively cut ties: “I am no longer her friend”.
With his bulging gaze and his lanky silhouette, Pierre Palmade had won over a large audience, enjoying a string of successes with shows like “They Loved” (1996), “They Loved” (2001), “I’ve Never Been as old” (2010), his boulevard plays and television audience records (“Le grand restaurant”).
– “My fears” –
Burlesque, his humor first targets the ordinary man with his little lies and his pettiness then will, over the years, focus on himself, an anxious party animal.
“It’s my intellectual exhibitionism that pushes me to go on stage. My fears of dying and my complicated relationships with others: my mother, my loves, my sexuality,” he confided to Paris Match in 2001.
That same year, when he had been married for six years to Véronique Sanson, he revealed his bisexuality. “I cannot reduce myself to homosexuality just because I am regularly attracted to boys.”
After his divorce in 2004, his sexual orientation increasingly informed his shows. He will cause controversy by admitting his “sadness at being gay”.
Born on March 23, 1968 in Bordeaux, to an English teacher and an obstetrician, Pierre Palmade claims to have lost “all masculine markers at eight years old”.
His father, called for a birth, died one night when his car was thrown against a tree. His mother refuses to allow him to attend the funeral, leaving him unable to grieve.
It is among women that he forms his sense of humor, versed in self-deprecation. He imitates Jacqueline Maillan, fascinated by her games of rupture and her excess. At 19, he stopped his HEC prep and left for Paris.
First meetings: the comedian Guy Bedos, who performs his first sketches, then Sylvie Joly who stages her first one-man show, “My mother really likes what I do”. The show was a great success.
In 2020, with his show “Assume, bordel!”, he addressed all the themes of gay couples. “With this piece, I hope to make amends for people who misunderstood me.”
In a psychiatric assessment carried out as part of the investigation into the road accident, the expert believes that drug consumption got the better of the “comedian, hard worker on an empty stomach, interested in mature women ” for the benefit of the “unbridled + reveler +, living his homosexuality in a displayed and all-powerful way”.
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