Address by Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, on the occasion of the tribute to Laurent Terzieff

The words that will come out know things about us that we do not know
of them." Laurent Terzieff liked this phrase by René Char. He found there, I
believe, a way of describing this act where the language pushes man to
To lose oneself: the theatre.

Laurent Terzieff, he is for me the actor with the smashing beauty, whose
eyes, until the end, under his emaciated features, will have kept the flame.

He is the man of theater for whom there was no public show, nor
private show. There are only texts; only the theater, and all the
theatre. He reminded us at his last Molière ceremony
a few months before leaving us, the vanity of the «cleavages» and
“labels” when you work for the same art.

With Laurent Terzieff, place, therefore, to the «poetic universe», these universes
in whose service he had put the Company which bears his name, this very
great adventure he had launched with his companion and partner
Pascale de Boysson.

Place to the physical and mental work, that of the actor, that of all the
theatre professions, which he will have experienced in his youth before
become an actor - from the blower to the machinist. Place to the text. I incubate
from one room to obsession.”

Depopulating oneself: place for the plasticity of roles, reincarnations
multiple. Athlete of the complaint in the Philoctète de Sophocle si
beautifully revisited by Jean-Pierre Siméon and Christian Schiaretti, at
Villeurbanne, at the TNP; Shakespearean actor adrift, unleashing the
laughter in Ronald Harwood’s Dressmaker at the Théâtre Rive-Gauche:
to the end he will have taken pleasure in the vast field of possibilities that is offered
only to the greatest actors, distancing itself from the long
of his romantic image, which had been clinging to his skin since
Marcel Carné’s Cheaters – as in I always dreamed of being a
gangster by Samuel Benchetrit, where the elegant dandy likes to play
villain on the way back.

The biggest names in cinema, in France and Italy, have entrusted him with
of the roles; but it was because he opposed all the facilities he would have
always privileged the theatre and its requirement - this art which for a moment
seems to promise us the secrets of the world», to resume a
formula he loved by Louis Jouvet. A theatre of which he made a
priesthood, a commitment to which he gave a mystical dimension.
Laurent Terzieff as Thomas Becket, in Murder in the Cathedral.

I extend a warm greeting to all those who have gathered for him
in the coming months: the Odéon-Théâtre de
Europe, Lucernaire, the Compagnie Laurent Terzieff of course, the NPT and
France Culture. With you, it is a magnetic lesson that survives this
beautiful discrete, listening to the world, serving the lucidity that the
theatre brings, this "significant reflection of the adventure of men", this
lucidity of which René Char said, to use a formula that Laurent
Terzieff especially liked, that she is the most wound
close to the sun».

Thank you.