fabrice lucini

Born on November 1, 1951, to Parisian Robert Luchini (his real name) is the son of a fruit and vegetable merchant of Italian origin. He was not good at studying, so he left school at fourteen to become a hairdresser’s apprentice, in a fancy salon, where he became known as Fabrice.

At that time, he used to frequent famous nightclubs in Paris, where he was met by the filmmaker Philippe Labro , who offered him a small role in his drama Tout peut arriver , with Jean-Claude Bouillon as a reporter looking for his wife. One of the greats of French cinema, Eric Rohmer , signed him as a secondary for  La knee de Clara . He is so happy with his work that he offers him the leading role in Perceval le Gallois , where he plays one of the knights of the round table. Fabrice Luchini established himself with his third work with this director, Las noches de luna llena, which was a great success, and for which he was nominated for a César for best secondary.

After this film, other great directors began to request him, such as Costa-Gavras ( Family Council ), Nagisa Oshima ( Max, my love ), Édouard Molinaro ( Beaumarchais, the insolent ), Philippe de Broca ( On guard! ), or Patrice Leconte ( Very Intimate Confidences ). For The Discreet , by Christian Vincent , and The Return of Casanova , by Edouard Niermans , he received new César nominations. He gets the precious trophy finally withAll this… for this? by Claude Lelouch . Rohmer would recruit him again years later for Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle and The Tree, the Mayor and the Media Library .

In parallel, he has triumphed in the theater, in productions such as the French version of “Arte”, by Yasmina Reza . He remembers that he became passionate about reading after devouring Céline’s “Journey to the End of the Night” when he was 17 years old. In 1985 he turned the text into a theatrical monologue, which he has continued to perform on stage, with modifications, for four decades. “In Céline the emotion of the spoken language beats flowing into the written language, with deceptively simple words, systematically alternating a real detail and a metaphysical song”, he explains.

He rarely allows himself to choose roles in commercial films, such as when he played Julius Caesar, in Asterix & Obelix, in the service of Her Majesty . “He wanted to show that he could shoot a different type of cinema,” he explains. “In addition, I am passionate about comics, and the experience allowed me to meet Anne Goscinny, daughter of the creator of the famous Gauls, who turned out to have a remarkable personality.”

In recent times he has been under the orders of François Ozon , who turned him into a well-to-do industrialist, husband of Catherine Deneuve , in Potiche, women in power , and a frustrated professor of French literature (one of his best performances), in the memorable In the House .

He gave life to an egotistical magistrate, who discovers that one of the members of the jury is a woman he loved long ago in The Judge , for which he won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Festival. “Fabrice Luchini is either loved or hated, and sometimes both at the same time. But in general the public enjoys hating him. And giving him the role of a rather hateful man, not at all generous, seemed like a great idea for the film to me,” recalls Christian Vincent , the film’s director. He also stands out as a funny literary critic in The Library of Rejected Books , with which Rémi Bezançon adapts a novel by David Foenkinos .

He swept bookstores with his autobiography, “Comédie française: Ça a débuté comme ça”, focused above all on his passion for the great French authors, such as  Molière , Rimbaud or Céline. He has stated in interviews that he does not consider himself specifically to the left or to the right. Even so, he frequently broths politicians that he considers uneducated, and on the contrary, he has publicly shown sympathy for some figures, such as the presidents of the republic Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron.

On one occasion, he gave an interview to the magazine “Famille chrétienne”, in which he comments that he had been curious about Christianity, despite the fact that he had learned about it from his opponents, such as Friedrich Nietzsche. “Since then, sometimes I am close to the faith, and other times I stray away,” he explained. His daughter, Emma Luchini ( Un début prometteur), is dedicated to realization. But curiously he has never worked with her. “He doesn’t want to, but I would like it very much,” he said. “If they told me that I can only work with one more director in my life, I would choose her.” Jealous of his privacy, for years hardly anything has been known about his private life. “For two decades, it was rumored that I was gay,” he says. It is known that he had Emma with a management secretary, with whom he was briefly engaged. Apparently he has finally found stability, after sixty years, with the theater director Emmanuelle Garasino.