An idyll revealed after his disappearance. During her long career, the singer and actress Marie Laforêt lived more or less known love stories. She was married to director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco before marrying a businessman named Alain Kahn-Sriber in 1971. She will marry the stockbroker Éric de Lavandeyra in 1990 for the third time before divorcing four years later.
It is only in her stories, published posthumously in her memoir We have no other choice but to believe, that she reveals her love affair with director Louis Malle. The two stars met during a combination of circumstances at the end of the 1960s. “She won a theater competition called “Naissance d’une étoile”, organized by Europe 1. There had been a parade many actors and actresses and she won this competition. The prize was the shooting of a film”, recalls the biographer Alain Wodrascka, author of the book Marie Laforêt, Portrait of a free star.
It was on this occasion that she met the director Louis Malle. In her memoirs, the golden-eyed girl bluntly reveals that he was her first lover. “One evening. Suddenly, this crystal and painful instant came. In a look exchanged. Violence of eternity. I loved. Completely. Definitely. He understood that he was no longer alone, said: ‘Come to my house for a drink’ (..) I was still in a childish June (…) We saw each other again, we recovered, I enjoyed. He confided as one bleeds (…) confided in me mouth against the mouth, in a low voice, a childhood story that tormented him: his fusional, loving, incestuous relationship with his mother (…) It was breath-taking our diamond moment”, she wrote.
A love story that was ultimately impossible for the lovers, both suffering from trauma during their childhood. “According to what she says in her last book, he was the man of her life, but their relationship was impossible”, explains Alain Wodrascka. She had been raped as a child and had been abused by her mother. They had a complicity on this ground. It brought them closer in a certain way and in the same way, it was not a very healthy relationship”. As for whether Marie Laforêt regretted their separation, nothing is less certain. “A priori yes, but with hindsight, I think she was probably aware of it only at the end of her life, because in the meantime, she will meet other men”, explains the biographer.