Most striking item on French TV news this week?
Not the footage from the Islamist insurrection in parts of Iraq, or of the terrible carnage inflicted by terrorists allied to Al Qaeda in Kenya. Nor the more dramatic moments from the World Cup in Brazil, or reports on SNCF strikers lighting fires and generally behaving badly around France.
I will remember more keenly the interview the French actress Gisèle Casadesus gave to France 2 to mark her 100th birthday.
We all hope to grow old gracefully and to retain lucidity, dignity and memory. If not, the point of sticking around until 100 may seem lost. Gisèle had it all, whether or not the attentions of French TV's dreamboat newscaster Laurent Delahousse played their part. She was not interviewed propped up in her bed in some old people's home but present, bright-eyed and animated, in the studio.
Le Point magazine says France is a country full of elderly people that does not actually like les personnes âgées, except when they reach a ripe old age and find some way of showing an example. That's our Gisèle.
Some watching the interview on France 2's main evening bulletin on Sunday - when, as Delahousse noted, she was already a little older, 100 and a day - will have marvelled at her skin texture and general physical appearance, however well France 2 make-up staff worked to enhance it. It was the sharpness of her role as interviewee that caught my attention.
When Delahousse rattled off the date of her birth, she interjected: "At four-a-clock in the morning!"
She spoke of invitations to the Elysée, the optimism with which she approached life, her own lack of formal education, the concert she attended in Lille the night before with her son, Jean-Claude, conducting the orchestra. She's a widow, though her husband, the actor Lucien Pascal, also lived to be 100.
In a career that is still not over, she joined the Comédie-Française at 20, and has acted in numerous threatrical, cinema and television productions. She starred with Gérard Depardieu in Jean Becker's La Tête en friche in 2010 and has defied the years to assume the role of Anna Simon in this year's medium-length film Plus jamais ça!.
Le Point says she offers no secret of longevity beyond saying "it's other people who give me strength by raving about my age".
She does appear, however, to have paid more than lip service to advice given to her when young by another actress, Jacqueline Delubac.
"My dear Gisèle," Delubac told her, "you must force yourself to take at least half an hour's proper rest each day, dropping everything and losing yourself in a total vacuum. Wherever you happen to be, make yourself unavailable to anyone. Don't worry if people don't understand and say it's a star's whim. It'll serve as another detail for your biography."
Bon anniversaire, Gisèle.
Buy her book, Cent ans, C'est Passé si Vite [100 years have passed so quickly] at the Salut! Amazon link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/2368901205/salusund-21
Recent Comments