from a child from a working-class suburb of Hauts-de-Seine to a splendid figure in French cinema

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We will never see Michel Blanc again. The unforgettable Jean-Claude Dusse of Tanned bowed out at the age of 72 on the night of October 3 to 4, 2024, in Paris, after a heart attack. THE French cinema has lost a great actor, director and screenwriter, today widely praised by his peers, the public and the political world.

“Raised on cotton”

This talent can power us make people laugh as well as cryhe perhaps owed it to the fact that he knew how to embody the “common being”, with which everyone could identify. Born on April 16, 1952 in Courbevoie, in Hauts-de-Seine, Michel Blanc was pampered by his parents.

He was diagnosed with a heart murmur at birth, a condition at the origin of his hypochondria, he testified in 2015 in Paris Match : “I was raised on cotton. I was constantly told that I was fragile, that doesn’t reassure me. My father would sometimes tell me: ‘Don’t raise your arms too much in the air because of your heart.'”

An only child, Michel Blanc came from a modest background: his father is a mover, his mother, a typist. The two “climb the hierarchy”, he becoming an executive and she an accountant.

The taste of effort

He spent his childhood in the working-class suburb of Puteaux, where he went daily to have lunch with his grandparents, his parents living in Colombes and working all day. His maternal grandfather is his “hero”.

HAS Paris Matchhe will tell how this man who had intellectual abilities, but who had to work from the age of 11, was injured during the Great War, then refused to work for the Germans during the Second World War. After sheltering his family in the provinces, he stayed at the factory.

Michel Blanc admiringly shares this anecdote: “When I went to high school, he read all the books that were on the program at the same time as me. » A taste for effort which will anchor him in his personal, academic and then professional life.

Music before comedy

Initially passionate about classical music, the young man tried, at the age of 20, to make a career as a pianist, reports The Worldwho specifies: “’He devoted six to seven hours a day to it, but gave up quite quickly, understanding that he would never be ‘the new Arthur Rubinstein’. » He then chose to move towards the theater.

In the 1960s, Michel Blanc actually joined his group of friends from the Pasteur high school in Neuilly-sur-Seine. It is on the benches of this establishment in Hauts-de-Seine that the the brilliant Splendid troupenamed after the café-theater located at the time Passage d’Odessa, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

Success will come, dazzling and full of nuances: Michel Blanc was able to free himself from the image of an eternal loser that stuck to him to play dramatic roles and embrace a career as a successful director.

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