Between two promotional sessions for his fourteenth show on the French tour, Life experience, Anne Roumanoff, 58, swallows grilled fish à la husar – “fat free”, she says. Just a salad for your bar and “no oil”, the ascetic specifies. The only culinary fantasy the comedian allows himself in front of a full hall at the Olympia in Paris: a few drops of balsamic vinegar.
He puts down the silverware and reopens the pages of his debut. It goes back to this period when “life experience”, exactly, missing; in his young years spent between Sciences Po and theater schools, semesters of juggling between academic froth and dramatic art, with a common thread to find a way through the shower of disappointment: determination.
where did you grow up
At 17E a Parisian district, a rich district in which my family was atypical, far from the standards of the surrounding bourgeoisie. My mother is of Moroccan descent; my father is the son of Russian emigrants who settled in France, he was brought up in a certain precarious situation with the idea that he had to earn and earn. So he went to HEC and created a thriving import and export business with Asia. His success brought us material comfort. However, I grew up with the idea that I did not belong to a particular class, but that nothing was impossible.
What are your memories of the first stage?
They go back to childhood. At my elementary school in Paris, students could choose an extracurricular activity. I am 8 years old and I am taking theatrical expression classes. It was a strange time, after May 68, the girl who was looking after us was a bit… psychedelic. I still remember the horrified faces of all the parents at the end-of-year performance when they discovered their children in make-up, their heads covered in a barrel of detergent, banging on plastic boxes, boom, boom, boom… It was a bit crazy and not really theater in the traditional sense .
A little later I decided to be an actress. I am 12 years old, it is the summer of 1978. During a family dinner (television director) Arnaud Desjardins (1925–2011)a friend of my parents, entertains the table by doing impersonations of Louis Jouvet and Michel Simon (two figures of French theater and film from the first half of the 20th centuryE century). I’m going to come forward and proclaim out loud that I can sketch too! And I am reproducing a number by Sylvie Jola (actress and comedian, died 2015) which I had heard on the radio earlier that day. People laugh.
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