The Splendid troupe will say goodbye to Michel Blanc

A final tribute to the “anxious clown”: the funeral of actor Michel Blanc, who died suddenly at the age of 72, will be celebrated on Thursday in Paris in the presence of many personalities from cinema and theater.

Members of Splendid, the “friends for life” café-theatre troupe, should take the floor to pay him a final tribute, the actor’s entourage told AFP.

The funeral will be celebrated from 4:00 p.m. in the Saint-Eustache church, in the center of Paris where the actor lived. Father Yves Trocheris, priest of the church, will host the ceremony.

While several hundred admirers are expected to honor the memory of the actor, a sound broadcast of the ceremony is planned in the church square.

A major actor in comedic cinema in the 1980s before moving towards dramatic roles and a career as a director, Michel Blanc suffered a heart attack during the night from Thursday to Friday after a routine examination, and was transported to a Paris hospital where he died.

The Paris prosecutor’s office told AFP that it was not aware of his death. According to his entourage, the actor was the victim of anaphylactic shock, a rare but violent allergic reaction to a food, a drug or venom, which can lead to death in a few minutes.

In the case of Michel Blanc, it was a medication that caused the brutal allergic reaction.

“Immense pain”

The death of the eternal Jean-Claude Dusse, this character as exasperating as he is touching who for a time confined Michel Blanc in the roles of hypochondriac or clumsy, has sparked a shower of tributes.

The first of the Splendid troupe to leave, his former comrades Christian Clavier, Gérard Jugnot, Josiane Balasko, Thierry Lhermitte, Marie-Anne Chazel and Bruno Moynot expressed “with one voice” their “immense pain”. All seven of them posed again in April for the weekly Paris Match, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the troupe which was formed at the high school.

Upon the announcement of his death, Head of State Emmanuel Macron spoke of the loss of a “monument of French cinema”, while Prime Minister Michel Barnier estimated that “we all (had) a little Michel Blanc in us.

Director of the public success “Marche à l’ombre” (1984), Michel Blanc distinguished himself in dramatic films such as “Monsieur Hire” (1989), based on Simenon, and “Les Témoins” (2007) by André Téchiné by playing a homosexual doctor suffering from AIDS.

Despite the great public success of “Bronzés 3” in 2006, he modestly admits that it is not what he “did best”.

Nominated four times for the César for best actor, he won the precious statuette in 2012 for his supporting role as chief of staff in the political thriller “The Exercise of the State”.

ATS