The Élysée pays tribute to this “estimated figure of French theater”, “familiar face of our popular cinema”.
The actor Jacques Sereys, honorary member of the Comédie-Française who played fifty roles on stage but also in films by Louis Malle, died at the age of 94, according to the Elysée.
“He was an esteemed figure in French theater and a familiar face in our popular cinema,” said the presidency. in a press release on Sunday eveningEmmanuel and Brigitte Macron saluting “a man who had dedicated his life to the theater”.
“Jacques Sereys served texts which, by their melancholy or their panache, their verve or their subtlety, said everything about a certain French spirit”, continued the Elysée.
From boards to trays
Born in 1928 and raised by his mother, an embroiderer, he started out in a small job at Crédit Lyonnais before arriving in Paris in 1947, driven by his desire to become an actor.
“At nineteen, he read his classics, lost his accent and passed the Conservatory. From then on, he worked, read, learned”, writes on his site the Comédie-Française which he joined in 1955 for 30 years.
“With a pronounced taste for intermittency”, notes the House of Molière since he left the venerable institution in 1965 to finally join it in 1978 until 1997. He played a varied repertoire (Marivaux, Genet, Corneille, Goldoni or even Feydeau) and brought Giraudoux into the Comédie-Française. His comrades are Jacques Charon, Robert Hirsch, Jean Piat and Françoise Seigner.
He made forays into the cinema, notably with his role as head of the secret services opposite Yves Montand in I… like Icarus by Henri Verneuil (1979) and roles in The wisp and The breath in the heart by Louis Malle. He had married Philippine de Rothschild, also an actress at the French who played under the name of Philippine Pascale, and with whom he had two children, Philippe and Camille.
