Saturday March 18, 2023, Zabou Breitman was invited to Telematin on France 2. The opportunity for the actress to look back on her long career, which began at a very young age, and on her committed youth. Indeed, daughter of screenwriter Jean-Claude Deret and Quebec actress Céline Léger, Zabou alias Isabelle Breitman followed in the footsteps of her parents by engaging politically from an early age. A fight that she has since left aside, marked by the experience of her parents: “Rightly or wrongly, they were pure and hard. My mother followed, a little in submission. As a child, I was immersed in political commitment. Organizations like Secours rouge, Comité Gavroche… I cried when my mother told me that the Sorbonne had been taken over, confided Zabou Breitman in the columns of Le Monde, May 26, 2019. This momentum was beautiful, but, when you see your parents destroyed by that and that, in the end, because that they no longer have a job, you find yourself living in an unheated place, there is a disillusion.”
But in 1968, in the midst of a student revolt, the young Isabelle joined an artistic workshop at the Sorbonne, named the Revolutionary Gavroche Committee: “My parents were ultra-politicized, we were at the Sorbonne, I was sweeping, I was at the Revolutionary Gavroche Committee with my overalls and All”. Between the walls of the Panthéon, she had an encounter that marked her, and on which she agreed to return on the set of Damien Thévenot and Maya Lauqué. That of singer Renaud, at the time a politically engaged 13-year-old teenager. A meeting that did not leave her indifferent, she recalled more than 50 years later in
“He was beautiful”: Zabou Breitman under the spell
Responding to questions from Damien Thévenot, the mother of Anne and Antonin Chalon remembered this time when she had joined the revolutionary committee in order to get closer to the young Renaud: “I joined this committee because there was Renaud”, she admitted. And to continue: “Renaud at 13… It was more than a little crush. He was handsome.” If they ended up losing sight of each other, the one who is delighted to have seen him again some time later still has fond memories of that time: “I hear Mistral Gagnant and at that time I was still seeing it because the clip was made by Gérard Mordillat, who is a director with whom I worked”. After all these years, she describes her crush at the time as a teenager “amazing” And “brilliant”. “He is always brilliant by the way”, she clarified, visibly still charmed.
published on March 18, Alice GENSSE, Purepeople
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