On the stage of La Scala, he is “raw”. Sparkling and nervous, Jacques Weber declaims fifteen poems and excerpts from plays in the company of two exceptional musicians: accordionist Pascal Contet and Johnny Halliday’s harmonica player… Greg Zlap. The actor delivers his love of words there, rubs them like flints to cause sparks. Bringing the authors into dialogue, it gives the impression that Tom Stoppard challenges Paul Claudel or that Antonin Artaud apostrophes Marguerite Duras.
From Vladimir Maïakovski to Victor Hugo, via Raymond Devos, who instills a welcome dose of humor in this unclassifiable show, Jacques Weber is obviously having a lot of fun with this exercise in the middle of which he recites, casually, two of his own texts. It is that the artist also writes. And not just plays! Since 1985, he has regularly published works in which he “bares” himself, confiding his doubts, his joys but also, sometimes, his dramas.
In this second register, that of literature, the man is no less talented than with the words of others. Certainly, he advances in this territory with more muted steps than on stage. “Maybe because the letters intimidate me. Probably also because I know that it is impossible to play around in front of a white sheet, ”he emits. But his books are like him. Combining reflections on the profession of actor and the art of directing with surprising anecdotes from the backstage of the theater – and cinema -, it is told…
With all due respect to the author who says he is reluctant to talk about him, because he knows that “we often do it in an awkward way”, he signs, through his books, a mosaic of self-portraits all the more successful because ‘they are unaffected. Even if it means damaging its image a little. It is through writing that he delivered his fight against his demons, starting with that of alcohol; in a memoir (Paris-Beyrouth, Le Cherche Midi) he told how he had overcome an annoying loss of voice.
The new volume of his “Memoirs” (We never tell people enough that we love them, The Observatory) is a continuation of what must be called a work. “Really, what interests me is to speak as simply and sincerely as possible about the things and people I know,” he says. The desire for this new book was born from listening to a hit by Louis Chedid which gave it its title. “This song gave me a very deep desire to tell certain people how much I loved them,” he continues.
This book therefore takes the form of an anthology of declarations of love to about fifteen men and women who accompanied him throughout his career. Particularly difficult exercise! No insipidity however in its lines. Jacques Weber simply confesses his admiration and affection for a handful of figures. Conceived as a kaleidoscopic series of portraits, he drops the mask by expressing, with modesty, how much he feels indebted to those beings who have been by his side, all along the way.
There is François Florent, the master. The one who taught him acting since high school. But also the brother of Jacques… Bernard, who disappeared during the filming of season 2 of In therapy. “A lot of people wondered why I was so believable as a man mourning his elder. It’s just that I was going through the same mourning as my character with one of the most admirable beings I’ve ever met: the boy I would have liked to be, “he breathes with emotion.
In his book, we meet both Jeanne Moreau and Marguerite Duras, Robert Hossein and the duo Madeleine Renaud-Jean-Louis Barrault, the legendary tenor Gabriel Bacquier – with whom he made an appearance as an extra in an anthology Don Giovanni in 1966. There also appeared Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, but also a shooting star, taken away too soon by AIDS, Luc Alexander.
Are present, of course, the lifelong friends: Francis Huster, with whom he used his panties on the school benches, Maxime Le Forestier, who animated with his guitar, his student evenings at the end of the 1960s, Nathalie Baye and the band from the Conservatoire: Jacques Villeret and Jean-François Balmer. If he has fun slipping in three animal evocations: his faithful labrador Spartacus, the horse he rode in Don Juan (Big Rock) as well as the famous Nénette, the orangutan grandmother of the Jardin des Plantes, it’s because “animals were very important in (his) life. »
Tenderness surfaces when he evokes a youthful love affair with a married woman, the beautiful Annette, but also his fascination for the Italian supermodel Lucia Bosè, ex-wife of the legendary bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. Jacques Weber does not hide his confusion in front of the bewitching gaze of Isabelle Adjani. A dinner with Grace of Monaco ends with a great laugh. The evocation of Marie Gavardin, invaluable administrator of the Mogador theater, ends in a smile wet with tears.
The most beautiful pages remain those where he pays homage to director Emmanuelle Bercot and his friends Georges Lavaudant, who directed him in Le Roi Lear, and Pascal Rambert. Three directors who were able, by their simple gaze, to help him overcome the harshest dramas of his life. Tragedies on which he will not dwell, but which we feel have deeply shaken him. Between his modest words can be guessed all the gratitude he feels towards these three beings on whom he was able to rely on the time of the storm. “One writes both to repair the past and to pay one’s debts,” he concludes.
See: “Weber alive”, at La Scala, Paris 10th, until April 26.
Read: “We never tell people enough that we love them”, by Jacques Weber, March 2023, editions of the Observatory, 254 pages, 21 euros.
