PRESIDENT MACRON PAYS NATIONAL TRIBUTE TO LEGENDARY MICHEL BOUQUET

USPA NEWS - Emmanuel Macron recently re-elected, chaired as President of the Republic, his first second term ceremony of a national tribute was paid to Michel Bouquet this Wednesday, April 27, 2022 in the courtyard of the Hôtel des Invalides. The legendary theater and cinema actor, Michel Bouquet died on April 13 at the age of 96. Just before the speech, a giant screen displayed excerpts from the greatest films and plays in which Michel Bouquet played, pending the ceremonial arrival of the President of the Republic Macron and his wife Brigitte, in the arms of the deceased of Michel Bouquet, Juliette Carre. As soon as they arrived, they were received, as required by military protocol, by the Minister of the Armies Florence Parly before saluting the troops lined up on guard in the courtyard of the Invalides.

THE TRIBUTE CEREMONY TO MICHEL BOUQUET WAS SOBER SOLEMN AND MOVING------------------------------- The very sober and solemn ceremony, took place under a radiant and warm sun, celebrated one last time with emotion, a "goodbye" to Michel Bouquet by President Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte his wife alongside the widow of Michel Bouquet , Juliette Carré, with whom she had regularly shared the stage with him. Many actors and comedians were present. The actors Fabrice Luchini, Muriel Robin and Pierre Arditi, dictated a text in a very comedic way, even in a theatrical tone for Fabrice Luchini, before President Macron delivered his speech. When you played, Michel, you imposed, and what is very rare, something which is of the order of the indisputable (…) no one could replace you, ”said Fabrice Luchini. "Michel, you are the theater and the theater never dies," said Pierre Arditi.

President Macron, meanwhile, delivered a very beautiful and touching, even poetic eulogy, referring to the great works of the late iconic actor and the extent of his career and his construction. Michel Bouquet having already been buried on April 15 in the strictest privacy in the native village of his wife, actress Juliette Carré, in Yonne, there was no presence of his coffin as it is done in wax a national tribute to Invalides. Head of State Macron then symbolically placed a white rose at the foot of the giant photo of Michel Bouquet, in the company of a dozen students from the National Conservatory of Art.

MICHEL BOUQUET IS A MONUMENT OF THE FRENCH THEATER AND HAD PERFORMED 800 TIMES THE PLAY "THE KING IS DYING » Michel Bouquet, is a monument of French theater, and best known for having performed 800 times the play The King is Dying by Eugène Ionesco, among other great masterpieces of French theatre. In the cinema, he notably played in films by Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, two figures of the New Wave. He died late Wednesday morning in a Paris hospital. Since his death, President Macron has already paid him a vibrant tribute on Wednesday on Twitter. "For seven decades, Michel Bouquet brought theater and cinema to the highest degree of incandescence and truth, showing man in all his contradictions, with an intensity that burned the boards and burst the screen", a- he thus reacted, believing that "a sacred monster has left us". Michel Bouquet had also marked the cinema by embodying an astonishing Mitterrand on the evening of his life in Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars, by Robert Guediguian (2005).

MICHEL BOUQUET WAS ALSO A SACRED MONSTER OF FRENCH CINEMA WITH 100 FILMS------------------------ “In a hundred plays, in a hundred films, Michel Bouquet showed man to man. The ultimate teaching of this master, he the professor at the Conservatory, is not simply a lesson in theater: it is a lesson in truth. declared, President Macron about this great Lord of the French theater who not only was a legend, but had conquered the hearts of the French people in particular the actors, comedians, whom he had trained, helped, and was their mentor, in the big family of Acting. JULIE GAYET ACTRESS COMPANION OF EX PRESIDENT HOLLANDE WAS PRESENT AS WELL AS NUMEROUS ACTORS FROM THE GOTTA----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- During this national tribute to the Invalides to the actor Michel Bouquet, who died in mid-April at the age of 96, many actors and actresses were present in the courtyard of Invalides. The actress Muriel Robin, shed tears while reading her tribute text for her "mentor" Michel Bouquet, at the National Conservatory, the sacred monster of the theater who was unanimously hailed by his notary and the family of cinema and French theatre. “I was 25 years old. You caught me on the fly with a few words that overwhelmed me: ''I am your theater father'' . Mr. Bouquet, I tell you without emphasis, you have undoubtedly prevented me from dying and even more given me to live, ”she said. “Your tenderness tinged with modesty will never leave me. The king is dying. Not you, not you, especially not you, ”she added, her voice strangled, because she was a pupil of Michel Bouquet when she was young. An accordionist, who used to spend evenings at his house, on festive occasions describes to us "a simple man, very accessible, humanistic and kind, despite his immense notoriety linked to his talent as an actor" The actor Pierre Arditi meanwhile ended his speech in a theatrical way "Michel, you are the theater and the theater never dies", he said.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Another actor, Bruno Debrandt meanwhile, tells us, in a very emotional voice, and with tears in his eyes, having been taken under the wing of Michel Bouquet in his twenties, at the National Conservatory "He was a father, a close, a friend, a comrade, a mentor, a godfather, he was sensitive, upright and of great intellectual honesty, and even if he died for me he is still there in me, in us all actors, we are not orphans, his spirit is still there! » Other guests were seen, from many government ministers (Gabriel Attal, spokesperson, Roselyne Bachelot, Minister of Culture Michel Blanquer, of Education, Franck Riester of Foreign Trade and Europe, …) certain scents and MPs, as well as directors and actors, including Kad Merad, Michel Boujenah, Francis Huster, Yamina Benguigui.

REMARKS DELIVERED BY PRESIDENT MACRON AS NATIONAL TRIBUTE TO MICHEL BOUQUET WHO DIED AT 96 YEARS “For seven decades, Michel Bouquet burned the boards and punctured the screen. He is a sacred monster who has just left us. His childhood was confined to the harsh discipline of a boarding school, his adolescence obscured by war. But his mother made him discover his passion for the theater: an escape to the dream. Everything in the theater seemed to him more beautiful, stronger and truer than in life. He then became a real "child of paradise", who revered more than anything the actor Maurice Escande. One day in May 1943, when he was not yet 17, an irresistible force pushed him to knock on the door of this great member of the Comédie Française. All he had to do was recite a poem by Musset to convince his eldest that his destiny would be played out on the stage. A few months later, the young aspirant to the limelight entered the Conservatoire. The greatest authors soon demanded his perfect diction. Albert Camus took him on board in the creation of Caligula, The Righteous and his adaptation of The Possessed by Dostoyevsky. He developed with Jean Anouilh an even closer and more followed companionship, playing in six of his plays. He participated in the beginnings of the Festival d'Avignon, then those of the Théâtre National Populaire, with Jean Vilar. He jumped with both feet into Ionesco's theater of the absurd, interpreting hundreds of times, always with new nuances, the title character of the King is dying. He fervently served the existential and metaphysical theater of Samuel Beckett and the theater of radicalism by Harold Pinter. He had the taste and the talent to defend contemporary authors, to clear texts as a scout, to embody characters as precursors, without example or model. Of all the playwrights of his career, the greatest of all, for him, was Molière. And it was to Molière that he was the most faithful of all, he who played "Tartuffe", "the doctor despite Himself", "Dom Juan" and "L'Avare", he who embodied the hypochondriac and existential anxieties of the imaginary patient more than 600 times, three ages of his life.

"THESE TIRELESS REPEATED ROLES OF CERTAIN CHARACTERS WERE DEEPLY LINKED TO HIS VERY HIGH IDEAL OF THE COMEDIAN'S PROFESSION" PRES. MACRON SAID------------------------------------------------------------- “These tireless revivals of certain characters were deeply connected to his very high ideal of acting. As a great ascetic of dramatic art, tormented by the quest for the intentions of the author and the truth of the character, he read the plays hundreds of times as if to exhaust them, force them to surrender and reveal their secrets to him. . And for each role, he chiselled his gestures, modeled his voice, giving the words an unprecedented acuity, revealing hitherto unsuspected aspects of the texts, opening up new breaches that allowed them to be better penetrated. Michel Bouquet was an entirely embodied intelligence of the works, a scholarly but intensely alive exegesis.  To the delight of the greatest number, his mad love for the theater was not exclusive. His talent was also fixed on film, again in the company of the greatest, Jean Gremillon (White Legs), François Truffaut (The Bride Was in Black and The Mississippi Mermaid) or even Claude Chabrol, who entrusted him with six times Chabrolian archetypes of enigmatic and chilling bourgeois, sometimes perverse or murderous. Michel Bouquet's dark magnetism often earned him infamous roles: an inspector obeying only his own laws in A Condé by Yves Boisset, a formidable boss in The Toy by Francis Veber, a ruthless commissioner in Two Men in the City. with Gabin and Delon, or obsessive enemy of Jean Valjean in the role of Javert in Les Misérables Robert Hossein version. He was also a master, unforgettable, irreplaceable, for generations of actors, among the greatest. Michel Bouquet will have brought literature and dramatic art to their highest degree of incandescence and truth, by showing the human being in all his ambiguities and contradictions. The President of the Republic and his wife send their saddened condolences to his wife, Juliette Carre, an immense actress who will have shared his life for six decades, to his family and his friends, to all those of whom Michel Bouquet was the master, the inspiration or partner, and who today carry a part of his inheritance. Said President Macron, as a eulogy in National tribute for Michel Bouquet in the courtyard of the Invalides on April 24, 22.