Dany Boon has come a long way… His beginnings in comedy were not successful, especially since his very modest family did not really accept his artistic choices. In the show A Sunday in the countrysidethe actor looked back on his childhood memories which decided his destiny. Passion seized him when he visited a theater in Roubaix, at the age of 10, during a school trip: it was decided, he would make it his career. But his father, a former boxer who became a truck driver, is firmly opposed to this: he instead sees his son becoming an SNCF or PTT civil servant, with job security and a guaranteed paycheck.
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“My father is very strict, very hard on me,” says the star of Welcome to the Ch’tis. More severe with me than with the others because I am the eldest: I must set an example. And, when I tell him that I want to be an artist, he looks at me and says: “Never! You’re going to be a tramp, is that what you want?” » Looking back, Dany Boon understands his reaction: his family lives in precarious circumstances and has no links or network in this environment. “He had it tough, he worked very young too,” he confides. It’s normal, the only link we had with the artistic world was television. Michel Drucker, the films, the film club… The television was the cultural source of the house, it was on all the time because it was a social asset, so it had to stay on. »
To reassure his parents while avoiding PTT, young Dany takes a sidetrack and enrolls in a graphic arts school, where he learns drawing, with a diploma to boot. But his dreams of comedy have not left him, especially since his teachers encouraged him in this direction. “When I graduated, they told me: “Don’t go and lock yourself into a life as an illustrator, don’t go and work in an advertising agency, be an actor, an artist, an author…”
Worse than poor
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At the end of the 1980s, he arrived with his bag in Paris. The years of hardship begin, the Simon course which he can barely pay, the odd jobs, the debts, the banking ban… The father’s prophecy is not far from coming true: he does not always eat his fill and , when his friends go to a restaurant, he doesn’t have a meal and settles for the basket of bread… “Honestly, it was very hard,” he said ten years ago in The Parisian. At that time, I was doing street performances, mime, clowning and playing the guitar. It was really complicated also because I didn’t have a radish. I was worse than poor. »
We know the rest: the first scenes, the one-man shows, decisive roles in Merry Christmas Then The Lining and finally his successful films with The House of Happiness and above all Welcome to the Ch’tis, which made a tidal wave in theaters in 2008 with its 20 million admissions – the film would have brought in no less than 26 million euros. An essential figure in French comedy, he has been filming for around fifteen years as a director but also a producer, even if his latest opus, Life for realwas less attractive to its audience. A career and success that his father was unable to see: he died when Dany Boon was 22, one of the great wounds of his life.
