Jeanne Moreau & Étienne Daho
"We have been granted life to take risks," Jeanne Moreau asserts. Artistically, she has taken a great many of them to build, through daring choices, a career as an actress in the theatre and cinema, which made her an icon. She who became an actress in the same way as "one takes one's vows" first had a traditional itinerary: the Conservatoire, the Comédie-Française, Jean Villar's T.N.P. company, before she began in the cinema in 1950. Orson Welles, Louis Malle, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy and Rainer Werner Fassbinder often called on her to play "women that men dream of." But she never gave up the theatre, playing in 1986 for Klaus Michael Grüber Le Récit de la servante Zerline, which "marked her for life," before being La Célestine in Antoine Vitez's staging in 1989, which marked her return to the Festival d'Avignon. A Festival that she has taken part in since its earliest days alongside Jean Vilar, starting in 1947 (The Tragedy of King Richard II), then in 1951 (Le Cid and Le Prince de Hombourg) and in 1952 (Lorenzaccio). Convinced that acting "consists in making hear others' words," she would be Merteuil in Heiner Müller's Quartett, would read with Sami Frey in the Cour d'honneur in 2007, and would speak the words of Josephus for Amos Gitai in La Guerre des fils de la lumière contre les fils des ténèbres in 2009.
In Rennes, it was at the very end of the 1970s that Étienne Daho sang for the first time. It was the beginning of a career that would make him one of the key figures of French pop music. Since Le Grand Sommeil that revealed him, his albums - Mythomane, La Notte la notte, Pop Satori, Éden, Corps et Armes and more recently Réévolution and L'Invitation - have all been a great national and international success. Parallel to his personal projects, he has written for the singers Brigitte Fontaine, Jacques Dutronc, Jane Birkin, Alain Bashung, Françoise Hardy, Vanessa Paradis and Marianne Faithfull, and has dared to make cover versions of Mon manège à moi by Édith Piaf and Comme un boomerang by Serge Gainsbourg. A lover of literature and a great reader of poetry, his musical tastes take him as much towards British pop music, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie as towards the French singers like Léo Ferré and Barbara. In 1997, he sang an extract from Le Condamné à mort, titled Sur mon cou, before asking Jeanne Moreau to share with him, in an album and on stage, the entire poem in which he discovered all the themes of rock music: "Tragedy, theatricality, poetry, romanticism, violence and danger."
JFP, May, 2011.