The director and producer Alexandre Moix devotes a documentary to the icon of French cinema Patrick Dewaere, who died tragically at the age of 35. Declaration of love carried by Lola, the daughter of the actor, “Patrick Dewaere my hero” reveals all the faults of his father.
Patrick Dewaere is a myth. In less than ten years, he has starred in twenty-five films and marked French cinema for life. On the poster in particular of “Coup de tête”, “Les valseuses”, “Série noire” or even “Prepare your handkerchiefs”, he ended his dazzling career and his days forty years ago. He was then thirty-five years old, his daughter Lola Dewaere only two and a half years old.
Today, Lola Dewaere is devoting a documentary entitled “Patrick Dewaere my hero” to her icon father, produced with Alexandre Moix. A declaration of love that reveals all the faults of the actor, the raped child, the childhood stolen by a mother who forces him and his five brothers and sisters to become an actor. A life marked by this tragic childhood, in which personal dramas and cinema have always been confused.
>> To see: the documentary “Patrick Dewaere my hero”
painful family secrets
In 2003, Alexandre Moix had already dedicated a film to Dewaere. “But I had not said everything, explains the director to RTS. At the time, Patrick Dewaere’s mother was still alive and had erected a kind of fortress around these terrible family secrets”.
For the director, the taboos had to be lifted so that the reasons for Dewaere’s fatal gesture might finally be mentioned. “We cannot understand the gesture of this guy who commits suicide at 35 if we do not know that he was raped throughout his childhood, that he was forced to be an actor, that he never knew his father. There was a picture of his father in a drawer, his mother never showed it to him, although she had it published following he died in a memoir. All this, we knew it in the small circle of French cinema but the general public was unaware of it. Lola was fed up, I think, like many people, with the questions surrounding the reason for the death of her father. Forty years later, we can say”.
>> To see: In 1981 for the TSR, Christian Defaye meets Patrick Dewaere:
strength and savagery
The producer has a real admiration for Dewaere, whom he discovered when he was seventeen in “Coup de tête” by Jean-Jacques Annaud. “For me, he is the greatest actor in French cinema. He did not play but put his guts into his roles. I wanted to know very quickly who was behind this character. We felt a strength, a savagery and at the same time a tenderness and a weakness. I like these crazy characters who have flaws, “book Alexandre Moix.
For his documentary, the director worked on the basis of audio recordings made during interviews with the actor for articles in the written press. “I discovered pearls. For the first time, we hear Patrick Dewaere talk regarding his childhood, his mother whom he hates and this terrible childhood. And I proposed to Lola, whom I have known for twenty years, to make a film in the form of a love letter from a girl who did not really know her father”, concludes the filmmaker.
Interview by Julie Evard
Adaptation web: Melissa Hartel
