Ten years after the death of Cabu, at age 76, in the terrorist attack which targeted the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the pain remains strong for Dorothée. During a press conference at the end of December to present “Thank you Dorothée! », the show that TF1 will dedicate to her on January 24, the ex-host said she had “very badly experienced her disappearance”.
The one who is a star for an entire generation who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s did not hesitate to go out of her way to pay tribute to her cartoonist friend to the media in the hours following the attack.
“Like many, I didn’t understand and I still can’t understand, to tell myself that he is no longer here, that we can no longer laugh with him. I was extremely sad. Like everyone else,” she declared ten years later.
“He was cool”
Their friendship grew within the framework of “Récré A2”, the youth program broadcast from 1978 to 1988 on the second channel. Cabu appeared there regularly to present his caricatures. Those depicting Dorothy with an exaggeratedly elongated nose have thus passed into posterity.
In front of journalists gathered last month at TF1 headquarters, Dorothée told an anecdote. “We didn’t want to see his drawings before, otherwise it wouldn’t be funny. One day, he lifted his famous yellow sheet, William Leymergie saw the drawing, turned completely white and said: “No, there is no question of that!”. Cabu was very happy with what he had done. I never knew what he drew! » The mystery will therefore remain complete. But it was the only time when the artist, who notably worked for the satirical and caustic magazine Hara-Kiri made the show’s team go crazy.
Our file on Charlie Hebdo
“He was cool,” Dorothée continues. In “Récré A2”, he was more or less calm. He knew how to do very difficult things. We told ourselves that children were capable of thinking. If they weren’t interested or didn’t understand the drawings, it didn’t matter. Some understood, others didn’t, but we didn’t take them for… “stupid”. »
