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RTL.fr January 10, 2004
Highlights from Radio Interview with Fanny Ardant
Interviewer - Anne Sinclair
AS: Your famous voice... Do you know why you have this accent, which is sensual and Anglo-Saxon at the same time?
FA: I remember when I was very young I went to London to learn English and I shared a flat with an English girl, very beautiful, who wanted to speak French, so I came back to France without knowing the English language, but with the English accent!
AS: You are trying to tell me you didn't have it before?
FA: No, but it's a combination of influences from the countries I had lived in, because when I talk to someone I adapt their way of speaking. As time goes by, I make a sort of cocktail of influences.
AS: You were born in Saumur, and I think immediately about your father who was the cavalry officer. He was a soldier in the classic bourgeois family...
FA: ...bourgeois, but not classic, because my father was an antimilitarist soldier.
AS: What do you mean?
FA: Not a militarist in power, against the war...
AS: So what did he like about the army?
FA: The adventure. As a young man he was in Maroc, after all he was an independent cavalier, he liked the equitation.
AS: (...) You said that the most beautiful things you learned were the taste for freedom and for independence, and it's strange, because you lived in the family of soldier/serviceman, and these things usually are not connected with the cliché of a soldier's family.
FA: But exactly, that's the cliché, one can never be identified with his profession. I don't know what your mother and father were like, but I was very influenced by a man whom I observed very closely...how did he behaved, what was his taste for the literature and for the music, and in fact I was brought up by a man who could have been Don Quixote!
AS: What does freedom mean to you? Life without children, without husband, without a house...?
FA: I think that the principal thing is a spirit of independence, and not to live a life because you are supposed to. You can dream about home, family, but if you have not, you mustn't force your destiny and agree with the cliché of life. But I think that my father's great freedom was to consider human beings as what they really were like, without looking at their social position, nor their money...and it helped me very much to find the spirit of freedom.
AS: And your mother was also like that?
FA: More delicate, she adored my father. He was like a tree in my home and we were all brought up in his shadow...
AS: And you said that your daughters didn't know him, but you have the impression they know him by what you tell them about him.
FA: Yes, and I think that the people who are gone, you need to look for them and keep them alive by the details and not by the great ideas, so the way they bit the nails or they didn't...(Fanny laughs)
AS: Yes, because it's not by chance when you say that you bite your the nails permanently!
FA: Yes!
AS: You finished rather classical studies, political science, why? What did you want to do, what was the purpose?
FA: Because I wanted to be an actress.
AS: But what is the connection?
FA: Well, my parents were a little bit frightened and at the same time they loved me, so they thought it was a young girl's caprice, so they said "finish your studies, and then we'll see".
AS: You were in London then, and what did you want to do as your specialization? The international law?
FA: Yes, I thought I could take a course in affaires étrangères, and I was sent there by the cultural mission of the ambassador of France. And then I realized it wasn't for me.
AS: You often say "I don't read any newspapers, I never watch TV news". Why do you like that? Is it because of your difference, your egoism, or because of your need to escape, and that today's life and the news don't give you any escape?
FA: But I know all the important things that's being transmitted...
AS: You want to say that you know what happens anyway...
FA: All that is important, essential, because I used to read sometimes... I read all the time when I flew on planes...
AS: So you never buy any newspapers!
FA: No, because I had written in a little notebook the things that I have never bought, and it was: diamonds, cars, newspapers and bed sheets...
AS: ...and the sheets? (laughs) I don't know how you can sleep!
FA: The sheets...it was my mother who bought them.
AS: ...and maybe not the trousseau, either!
FA: Yes. Once I read all the Liberation on a plane, from A to Z, so to read the newspapers is a real occupation, because all the things which are important, incredible or cheerful, they are in the words, that you can see even when you pass by in your car.
AS: You mentioned the plane, but you often say that when you were a little girl, you didn't like to travel or the holidays...
FA: It's true.
AS: So you take a plane only when you go to work.
FA: Yes, I could see the whole world thanks to my work. You can tell me "that's because you can say you don't like travels", because my life lets me to go elsewhere. It's false, the travels and the holidays...you see nothing.
AS: Do you like Paris?
FA: Yes, I adore it.
AS: You like the Eiffel Tower, the arts...
FA: Yes, and the gardens of Paris.
AS: You feel at home there.
FA: Absolutely. It's the cinema and the literature that give you a real idea of the countries. (...)
AS: You took your acting courses rather late. What made you subscribe to the courses of dramatic art so late?
FA: I didn't live in Paris, so I didn't know that there was a school...You can have a great passion for something inside of you and not know how to achieve it. But it's true that if you have the passion to write within you, then you just write. And you may love to go to the theatre and you may want to be on the another side of the fence, but not visualize immediately how to get there; and it was my case... The day I understood what I had to do, I didn't think more about it. I did it.
(...)
© FANNY ARDANT Online Translated by Aleksandra Darsant Edited by George Sand
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