Through comedies, tragedies, theater and cinema, François Cluzet is, at 69, one of France's most popular actors. Guillaume Canet's Tell No One (2006) won him the César for Best Actor in 2007, but it was the huge success of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano's The Intouchables (2011) that brought him worldwide recognition. He is currently on stage at the theater Les Bouffes Parisiens, playing the role of a psychoanalyst committed to a psychiatric institution, in Encore une journée divine ("Another divine day"), a play adapted from the 2021 novel Noir sur blanc by Denis Michelis. Like a reminder of his tormented past.

I wouldn't have got here if...

...I hadn't seen [Belgian star] Jacques Brel [1929-1978] on stage at the Champs-Elysées theater. I must have been 12. Every year, my aunt would go to my father's newsagent, pick up L'Officiel des spectacles [a trade publication with theater and cinema programming] and, six months beforehand, book a show for December 31^st. That was her present. That year, she said: "We're going to see Brel!" My grandmother asked, "What about the kids?" – "The kids too!" And we found ourselves in front of Jacques Brel.

There I see a guy in Don Quixote garb singing his heart out, in tears and sweat. And my first reaction was to say to myself, "His parents are going to tell him off," because that's not the kind of mood we got into back home. But it turned out to be a 20-minute standing ovation. And then, suddenly, I realized that you could cry like that and be applauded, and I said to myself: "That's what I want to do!" Up until then, at home, I'd mostly seen my father depressed, and, when we cried, nobody applauded. My mother had left, and he took it very hard.

Did your mother abandon you?

You have 85.55% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.