The comedian and comedian is seriously injured after a road accident on Friday evening. According to the police, Pierre Palmade was under the influence of cocaine while driving, an addiction he has publicly mentioned.
A battle he has been waging for years. Comedian Pierre Palmade, seriously injured after a road accident on Friday evening in Seine-et-Marne which left three other seriously injured, including a pregnant woman who lost her baby, was under the influence of cocaine while that he was driving. An addiction which the actor has openly spoken about on several occasions in recent years.
“Cocaine addiction is very sneaky (…). It’s the sneakiest drug I know,” he openly admits in an interview on the show “C à vous” on France 5 in 2019.
This “poison” or “disease”, as he himself says, has been chasing him for years, which the actor chooses to discuss publicly. “He talks a lot about this subject in the media (…). This fight, he carried it for him, but also for the others”, assures the communication adviser Marie Virginie Klein on BFMTV.
“At 20, I thought it was entertainment”
He discovered cocaine when he was 20 and moved to Paris after a childhood in Bordeaux. At the time, those who dreamed of being an actor were unaware of the danger awaiting them. “Nobody warned me”, he assures in 2019 in the program “We are not lying” on France 2.
“I didn’t know at 20 that it was a disease, I thought it was entertainment. I suspected at 30 that it was poison, at 40 I was sure that I was cocaine addict and that I was going into the wall”, still assures in this program the fifty-year-old who then says he wants a “more peaceful” life.
The actor experienced tumultuous years, marked by his successes on stage, but also by a rampant consumption of cocaine. It happens to him to party for days, in the company of escort boys, without sleeping and without eating. This life of excess, the one who lost his father at the age of 8 in a car accident recounts it frankly in his autobiography Tell my dad I’m famouspublished in 2019.
He sometimes arrives on stage “in a bad state”
After years of heavy use, drugs then took a central place in his life and poisoned his professional and personal life. Pierre Palmade returns in 2019 to an episode that occurred a few years earlier and which particularly affected him.
He then performs on stage with the actress Michèle Laroque, who is also his close friend and he is “not fresh from the day before”, he admits modestly.
“I saw a tear running down his cheek (in full performance),” he says. “Michèle was fed up that I was in a bad state,” he concedes.
“I’ve been trying to quit for 10 years”
This dependence was well known in the theater and cinema world. “When he played with Michèle Laroque, he was sometimes so stoned that he had trouble getting on stage. How many times, on TV sets, he did not come because he was not in shape” , tells BFMTV the journalist at Paris Match Benjamin Locoge.
In an interview in January 2022, Muriel Robin, who has often worked with Pierre Palmade, returned to the comedian’s addictions. In the show “Chez Jordan”, she says: “He scared me, yes, a lot. He puts himself in danger so of course we are scared”.
This addiction is then known to the public, when the comedian begins to feed the pages of news items. Already in 1995, he was sentenced for cocaine consumption. In 2019, he was placed in police custody for “use and acquisition of narcotics” after being falsely accused of rape.
Aware of the influence exerted by this drug, Pierre Palmade tries to get out of it. “I’ve been trying to quit for 10 years,” he said in 2019.
“An Infernal Machine”
“He tried to get out of it over and over again, but he always fell back,” says Benjamin Locoge.
“He has already done two cures, but obviously it was not enough”, adds the journalist who evokes an “infernal machine”.
“I felt him completely on the wire on the drug”, assures on BFMTV Séverine Servat, journalist head of section for the magazine Gala about this actor whom she describes as “brilliant”, but “flayed alive”.
At the age of 40, Pierre Palmade really wants to take control of his addiction. He buys a house in Seine-et-Marne to get away from Paris and its temptations. Friday evening, it was in this residence that the actor was partying in the company of several people, before he hit the road.
