The two had befriended in 1969 in Las Vegas while Annie Girardot was shooting in the feature film A man who pleases me, reports Jeremy Picard in the book A life of comedy, co-written with Line Renaud.
In 1995, the famous review leader Line Renaud and the talented actress Annie Girardot gave each other this time the reply in the mini-series les Filles du Lido. A production of TF1 which brought together many sizes of the medium including Francis Huster or Jacques Spiesser. Their friendship does not date from this film. “In one of the scenes, Annie calls Line a “gourdasse”. The two actresses then have fun shouting at each other like this throughout the filming”, we can read.
On the film set of the fiction, Line Renaud, who has long refused to sing in Germany, as well as the members of the cast then witness the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. “My playing partners and I realized that she couldn’t remember her text correctly. But her instinct as an actress being absolutely extraordinary, she embroidered and invented dialogues. Jean Sagols didn’t cut, he let it spin, so we followed her. If our line was good, we threw it, if not, we improvised. We didn’t really know what to attribute her memory problems to,” she said in her book.
It was not until 2006 that the public of Annie Girardot will learn the truth about her illness. Unwell, the actress moves into a nursing home. Her friend Line Renaud then visits her, without knowing if the latter will recognize her since the daughter of the actress, Giulia Salvatori warns her that she no longer recognizes anyone. But the miracle finally happened. Approaching her friend’s bed, she exclaims: “Hello Annie. It’s your gourdasse”, and Annie Girardot replies: “” Oh! Ma Line!”. A moment of complicity that will remain forever in the memory of Line Renaud.
