Chantal Lauby is celebrating her 74th birthday on March 23, 2021. There is no doubt that she will share this moment with her daughter, Jennifer Ayache, born in 1983 from her union with Jean-Pierre Ayache, they who are so united according to the words of the actress in the magazine Causette. “We are at the limit of fusion, she and I. I raised her alone. We are both artists. When there is one who falls, the other shoulders her,” she said in January 2019.
Jennifer Ayache, does this name ring a bell? It’s normal, the daughter of the one who plays the mother in What have we done to God, is none other than the singer of the group Superbus who met with success in 2006 with the title Butterflies. A career as an artist made possible thanks to the dedication of her mother, who did not hesitate to send her daughter to the United States so that the latter could pursue her dream. “My daughter left at 14 and a half for the United States to learn music. All the parents of students said to me: ‘But you’re sick of letting her go!’ I knew I was going to worry, but I was not going to prevent him from living something”, confided Chantal Lauby in the columns of Causette.
The father of his daughter has not been very present for the latter, as his daughter had declared to Closer in 2016. “I am starting to get closer to him. He was not very present during my childhood. I think that at a certain age, you get closer to the absent parent. I never closed the door to him,” she explained.
Despite everything, with hindsight, the actress, revealed in Les Nuls on Canal, is plagued by some regrets about the childhood of her daughter, whom she raised alone while facing both her professional and parental obligations. In January 2020, at the microphone of RTL, she confided: “There are plenty of times when I think back to all that, when I say to myself ‘all the same, I left her for a long time alone too’. I took her from every once in a while on Saturdays at the studio, but there were times when I would come home, she was already in bed. And it breaks your heart when you look back on it now in hindsight. Even though I still gave her time, there there are times when I say to myself ‘hey, I could have thought a little more about her too'”.
For some time, Chantal Lauby shared the life of Jean-Pierre Ayache, a union of which we know almost nothing except that it resulted in the birth of singer Jennifer Ayache.
In January 2020, guest of Mouloud Achour for her program Clique broadcast on Canal , the actress explained that she had an extremely poor and “complicated” love life. “Family life, well, I’m the mother of a young woman. But my sentimental life, poor thing. Now, it’s been quite a few years that I haven’t had great stories, no.”
If some wanted to lend her adventures with some of her friends to whom she was very close like Dominique Farrugia or Alain Chabat, it would not be according to the words of the actress. Invited on the set of the program Touche pas à mon poste by Cyril Hanouna, Chantal Lauby returned to her friendship for her two playmates, ensuring that their relationship has always been platonic. “I am an excessively modest person. Even when we did Les Nuls the show, we were in the same box (…) I always managed to keep some distance with them”.
The only woman in the band for more than 30 years, the interested party specifies that she has never made a gender distinction between her and her two friends. “For me, it was really my work buddies. I was like them, I didn’t see sex. I didn’t see myself as a woman among men,” she added in January 2020.
Always remained extremely discreet about her romantic relationships, Chantal Lauby nevertheless declared, in 2016, to the magazine Causette, to adore “falling in love” but also to live alone: “I have no husband, no official in any case .I’m an independent single person with a need for total freedom.”
You may not have known it, but it was as an announcer for FR3 Auvergne that Chantal Lauby began her career on TV, barely 20 years old. Very quickly, she left Auvergne for the Côte d’Azur where she met the late Bruno Carette. A partner she considered “like her brother”. After having been the local correspondent for the 8 p.m. games in Cannes, the two friends presented several humorous programs together on France 3 Marseille and Radio France-Côte d’Azur such as Azur Rock, A small clip is better than a big slap and Bzzz!
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Surrounded by Bruno Carette, Alain Chabat and Dominique Farrugia, Chantal Lauby is the only woman in the group of comedians: Les Nuls. On Canal, the famous band that will be at the origin of the police comedy, The City of Fear, will chain sketches, some of which will become legendary. With the “JTN”, understanding the zero television news, “ABCD Nuls” or even “Les Nuls l’mission”, the four troublemakers of television will chain the 400 blows and make the whole of France laugh.
The beginning of the consecration for Chantal Lauby who after more than thirty years is still associated with Dummies and has remained very close to Alain Chabat and Dominique Farrugia, Bruno Carette having died.
It was in 1994 with her three companions that Chantal Lauby made her film debut in The City of Fear written by the Merry Band of Dummies and directed by Alain Berbérian. Then, she will chain the small roles in the comedies of her friends who have become filmmakers. In 1996 she played in Delphine 1 – Yvan 0 by Dominique Farrugia, then the following year in Didier by Alain Chabat. The actress is also in the cast of the cult Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra written and directed by Alain Chabat.
The actress passed from the small to the big screen will chain roles in the cinema and try her hand at directing in 2002 for the feature film Leave your hands on my hips in which she interprets the title role, a forty-something who, when her adult daughter leaves to move in as a couple, decides to live life to the fullest.
It was in 2014 that Chantal Lauby after The City of Fear, 20 years earlier, will know the consecration by interpreting alongside Christian Clavier, Mr. and Mrs. Verneuil, a bourgeois Catholic couple whose daughters end up marrying a Muslim , a Jew and a Chinese, in the successful comedy What have we done to God. A real hit at the French box office since the film directed by Philippe de Chauveron dealing with mixed marriages and racism with humor recorded more than 12 million admissions that year. A success that has also been able to scare Chantal Lauby as she confided to Gala.
“When all of a sudden we arrived with 12 million spectators, when you pass in the street, when they call you Mrs. Verneuil, you chat with everyone as if we knew each other. These are strong moments, magnificent because you have direct contact with people right away, but when you come home, you immediately say to yourself, ‘Why me? What do I have to say to them?'”
