Catherine Frot returns to the theater in this fall of 2022 for “When the child appears”, a play skilfully situated between social comedy and boulevard theater, where she has the earthy Michel Fau as her husband…
As we know, Catherine Frot chooses her scenarios carefully, a requirement that makes her rare on the big screen. The actress, who received Molière for Best Actress in 2016 for “Fleur de cactus,” is no less diligent when it comes to acting. The one who goes back on the boards at the Théâtre de la Michodière, in Paris, until December 31, 2022, chose the play – “When the child appears” – and the partner – Michel Fau, director and husband of Catherine Frot on the boards – just what he needed. In this explosive boulevard comedy, she plays Olympe, a bourgeois post-war mother, steeped in the conventions of the moment, who will be faced with an unplanned pregnancy when her son has impregnated his secretary.
These two pregnancies, to say the least embarrassing, occur when Charles Jacquet (Michel Fau), Olympe’s husband and Under-Secretary of State for the Family, obtained the closing of brothels and the increase in penalties for crimes of Abortion… In addition to the jubilant observation of this tidy family in full explosion, it is a fierce social satire that the author André Roussin imagined, around the good morals of the time and in particular the abortion issue. Catherine Frot, well helped by her companion Michel Fau, obtains the best reviews, playing the score of this woman of the great world, plunged into the greatest disarray, to perfection.
Catherine Frot is a film and theater actress. Very popular, she has been recognized by her peers by accumulating ten César nominations alone since 1986. She has won two: one for Un air de famille (1997), the other for Marguerite (2016). She has also been awarded two Molières.
Born on May 1, 1956 in Paris (13th century) to an engineer father and a math teacher mother, Catherine Frot discovered a predisposition for comedy very early on, taking lessons from the age of 14 at the Versailles Conservatory. . The Ecole de la rue Blanche and the Conservatory very naturally followed in 1974, before devoting himself to the theater, via the company of the Red Hat.
Having studied with Alain Resnais then Philippe de Broca, Catherine Frot already had a ten-year career and twenty films behind her when the world of cinema truly discovered her quirky humor in Cédric Klapisch’s grating comedy, Un Air de famille (1996 ), dedicating her to the César for Best Supporting Actress. But it is above all through her subtle performance as a casual and inconsequential mother, in La Dilettante (1997), by Pascal Thomas, that she develops all her palette, the first major role rewarded with the prize for best actress at the Moscow festival. This burlesque niche, she still exploits it with malice in the absurd and very British investigations of the eccentric Prudence Beresford (My Little Finger told me, 2005, Crime is our business, 2008), under the accomplice paw of the same Pascal Thomas.
In 2009, Albert Dupontel stages and stages himself in Le Vilain. He entrusts Catherine Frot with the role of his character’s mother. Then, the actress alternates detective films (Coup d’Éclat, 2011, Associés contre le crime, 2012) and comedies (Bowling, 2012) before becoming famous in Les Saveurs du palais, which earned her a ninth César nomination. In 2015, Catherine Frot distinguished herself in Marguerite and even won the César for best actress. If she continues to shoot in 2017, appearing in Sage Femme and Momo, the actress then decides to take a break from her career, even thinking of stopping the cinema.
For eighteen months, the public will no longer see it on the big screen. In an interview given to Parisianin March 2019, Catherine Frot will return to this period of break: “I was tired, I did not know where to go… I did not experience depression, but I wanted to find myself with my personal belongings, with my daughter, my friends. I wanted to be available. To stop being an actress for a little while”.
After taking time to rest and recharge, the actress decided to make her big comeback in March 2019 with the film Who Loves Me Follows Me. Catherine Frot appeared the same year in the play La Carpe et le Lapin, alongside Vincent Dedienne. The Caesarized actress will also be in the cast of Sous les étoiles de Paris and La fine fleur. In 2021, she played a distraught woman in the middle of two conscripts who returned from Algeria in the 1960s (Gérard Depardieu and Jean-Pierre Darroussin), in the drama Des hommes.
Catherine Frot remains very private about her private life. However, she shares the life of the French director Michel Couvelard whom she married in 1987. She notably plays in her husband’s film Inséparables, released in 1999. The couple had a daughter, named Suzanne.