Patrice Chereau

Born on November 2, 1944, in Lézigné, a small town in the center-west of France, Patrice Chéreau was immersed in the world of art since childhood, because his father was a painter and his mother was a draftsman. Already as a child he played actors at school recess, and at 16 he was already on stage.

After numerous productions as an actor, he began directing prestigious companies, carving out immense prestige among theater connoisseurs. In the 1980s he staged various shows based on texts by the playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès. Patrice Chéreau was also well known for his operatic productions.

He made his film debut as an actor, with a supporting role in Trostky , from 1975, a biography of the Russian revolutionary by Jacques Kébadian, although the Polish Andrzej Wajda got much more out of him , in Danton , where he turned him into Camille Desmoulins, another revolutionary, this French time. He later played Napoleon himself in Youssef Chahine ‘s Adieu Bonaparte , and played small roles in Michael Mann ‘s The Last of the Mohicans and Michael Haneke ‘s The Time of the Wolves .

As a director he came to film 11 feature films and 4 telefilms. He debuted in 1975 with The Flesh of the Orchid , an astonishing thriller with Charlotte Rampling as an heiress sent to a mental hospital by her aunt to keep the money. His best-known work is undoubtedly Queen Margot , a luxurious adaptation of Dumas’s novel, for which Isabelle Adjani won the Best Actress award at Cannes. He plays Marguerite de Valois, better known as Margot, whose mother, Catherine de Medicis, marries a Huguenot (French Protestant), Henry of Navarre, while plotting the tragic Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

Pascal Greggory and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi starred under the orders of Patrice Chéreau Those Who Love Me Will Take the Train , in which the relatives of a deceased artist gather on an express to attend his funeral. In Intimacy , some strangers have fleeting sexual encounters, until the man is logically curious to know more about her and start a more human approach. The film scandalized for its sexual crudeness. He won the Golden Bear in Berlin.

He tried not to repeat himself, with completely different projects. In His brother of him, she recounted the brotherly relationship of two long-estranged men. Isabelle Huppert starred in Gabrielle , in which she plays a woman who has decided to leave her husband to go with her lover. “I had worked with her in the theater, and she is a great actress,” said the director. “I treated her like any other actor, trying to get her to play a character with me that was unlike anything she’s ever done before.” Patrice Chéreau ‘s career ended in 2009 with Persécution , with Romain Duris and Charlotte GainsbourgLike a couple whose house a stranger sneaks into.

He left his project to shoot another biography of Napoleon unfinished, with Al Pacino , to whom he had sent his various revisions of the script over the years. Patrice Chéreau was very active until illness prevented him from working. “My mother, who died at 91, she drew for up to six months before she died. After 90 she still said: I think I’m making progress. I feel the same way.”