An actress adored in France and internationally, Mélanie Laurent is also an ambitious director. This Friday, November 1st, she signs Librethe biopic about 1980s French robber Bruno Sulak, with Lucas Bravo in the title role, available on Prime video. One year to the day after the release of her feminist action film Thievesin which she played alongside Adèle Exarchopoulos and Manon Bresch in addition to directing it, the forty-year-old returns with a thriller with a glamorous cast that should get people talking. As the filmmaker prepares to continue interviews, let's look back at the men who have marked her life, in love and friendship, without forgetting her father and her younger brother.
Because if Mélanie Laurent never spoke about her love life, she experienced a few stories that weighed heavily on her romantic journey. Like the one shared, from 2006 to 2009, with actor Julien Boisselier. The two actors – 13 years apart in age – met in 2005, on the set of I'm fine, don't worryby Philippe Lioret. At 22, Mélanie Laurent plays Élise, aka Lili, a young woman who fell into anorexia after the strange disappearance of her twin. Julien Boisselier plays his friend Thomas, known as “Frog”. For this role, she won the César for Most Promising Actress in 2006, which she dedicated to her companion: “The best part of all this is sharing it with the one you love, so Julien is for you.”
>> PHOTOS – Mélanie Laurent: who are the men who mattered in her life?
Damien Rice, Mélanie Laurent’s little-known crush
After her breakup with Julien Boisselier, Mélanie Laurent lived a short romance with the Irish musician Damien Rice, whose work she has always admired. Both collaborated on the actress's first album, Waiting for you. When he finally came out, the couple were no longer together but remained on very good terms, as she confided to ELLEin 2010. She recounts their meeting and their wonderful alchemy in musical creation. “There was one person in the world I wanted to sing with: Damien Rice. My American producer called him. Miracle, he had just landed in Boston… (…) Three hours later he disembarked. He was supposed to stay twenty-four hours, he stayed fifteen days”she will remember. “I think I've been waiting for someone like him for a long time. We parted gently. But we see each other all the time, we have become friends. I have a key to his house in Ireland, he has one to mine here”she will continue, grateful and peaceful.
If we know nothing about the identity of the fathers of her children, Léo (11 years old) and Mila (5 years old), Mélanie Laurent was delighted to have found the father of her son, in the columns of Madame Figaro in 2012. “Before, I would never have known how to let someone happy, someone gifted for happiness, into my life. Everything is balancing out right now. I don't go out like I used to, I'm no longer afraid of being alone. [Être la maman de quelqu’un]I really want it. It's going to happen soon, we had to find a good dad. It's done”she revealed, a year before giving birth to her eldest. From the father of her daughter, with whom she married, we will only know that they lived together for four years in Los Angeles, from 2016 to 2020, before she returned to live alone in Brittany with her children.
Mélanie Laurent and Nicolas Bedos, the story of a ruined friendship?
Among the men who mattered to Mélanie Laurent, let us also mention Nicolas Bedos. For a few years, the director and the actress were very close friends. In 2022, the director of Masqueraderecently convicted of sexual assault, spoke about their relationship with emotion, full of praise for his ex-acolyte. “I owe a lot to this young woman, a lot. Life has meant that we have been more or less angry since then, but I owe a lot, a lot to this ultra-gifted, ultra-attractive girl, who I loved quite simply, who I loved as an artist. She moved mountains and she took me out of a path that was heading straight towards drunkenness and self-denigration and the worthlessness of a desperate 'son of a'.he admitted then, remembering his twenties, marked by severe depression.
On the friendship side, Mélanie Laurent found in Cyril Dion a formidable adventure partner. Brought together by their common concerns for the future of the planet, the actress and the environmental activist together produced the documentary Tomorrowreleased in 2015. A manifesto in favor of the fight against climate change, seeking solutions to the alarming predictions of hundreds of scientists. In 2016, it was together and extremely moved that they received the César for best documentary. A great reward to crown their touching complicity with success.
Her famous father Pierre Laurent, her brother Mathieu, the director Quentin Tarantino… discover the other men who turned Mélanie Laurent's life upside down in our slideshow !
Photo credits: RACHID BELLAK / BESTIMAGE
