The actress Christine Boisson died on October 21 at the age of 68, following a lung disease. A warrior body, a fiery gaze and a dull voice that knew how to contain the scream: this tempestuous actress did not leave the spectators indifferent. While she began a career as a model, she was only 17 when Just Jaeckin asked her to play in Emmanuelle (1974). She is Marie-Ange, a teenager devoid of inhibitions. The scene where she masturbates in front of Sylvia Kristel’s gaze will make a lasting impression. It’s the eternal story of an actress who, because she stripped naked once in the cinema, moreover in an immensely popular erotic film, is constantly offered the same role.
Tired of only having to offer her physique, Christine Boisson attempted and succeeded in a 180-degree turn thanks to theater, which opened the doors to international auteur cinema. Spectators will remain marked by this frail face with its rounded forehead, these high cheekbones and these inky eyes, fixed, dazzling, childish – Boisson, or the secret twin of Jeanne Moreau, who wears her face like a mask.
On stage, she was one of those unpredictable performers who we don’t know what they are capable of doing. To cross or not to cross the limits? With her, the seesaws did not warn. Softness and then violence, masculine and feminine intertwined, sensuality and brutality, slowness or speed. She tamed her wildness on the stage. “She was a queen”, testifies on social networks Jean-Marie Besset, translator of a play by Tennessee Williams that she performed in 2011 (Tokyo Bar). This will be the last major appearance in the theater of this performer trained at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art (class of 1977). She was there, adds Besset, “incandescent and masterful”.
The taste for risk
Such a temperament was undoubtedly not easy to handle. When she films it in The Actresses’ Ball (2009), director Maïwenn casts her in the role of a tough, violent and abusive theater teacher who demands from her students an unrestrained gift for acting and texts. Was this portrait faithful to him? Christine Boisson didn’t like half measures. She was, she confided to Monde in 2004, “actress above all, even before being an individual, entering her career very early”.
Entered very early, it’s true, and very quickly co-opted by the cream of the directors. Roger Planchon, pope of decentralization in the 1970s, directed it three times in his stronghold, the TNP of Villeurbanne (Pericles, prince of Tirethe Shakespeare, and 1977, Antony and Cleopatraby the same Shakespeare, in 1978, Andromache, by Racine, in 1988). She also collaborates with Robert Gironès, a lively, radical and avant-garde artist. She has a taste for risk and chooses to move towards the authors of her time. Which means that she accepts the leap into the void of contemporary writing.
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