The actress and singer Geneviève Grad died on the night of November 7 to 8, 2024 at the age of 80, following a long fight against illness.
“Douliou-douliou-douliou Saint-Tropez, you can walk barefoot in Saint-Tropez”. If the credits of Saint-Tropez police stuck in your head, it’s thanks to her. Geneviève Grad, actress who played the daughter of Louis de Funès in the comic film saga, to whom we owe the credits of the first episode, died on the night of November 7 to 8, 2024. Her husband, Jean Guillaume, informed AFP that his 80-year-old wife died “at the end of a courageous fight against cancer”, at the Blois Polyclinic in Loir-et-Cher.
After having been a dancer at the Paris Opera, Geneviève Grad’s first role in the cinema was in 1961, when she played opposite Jean Marais in Captain Fracassebefore appearing in Italian adventure films of the sixties. However, it was in 1964 that the general public discovered the face of Geneviève Grad, who played the daughter of the chief marshal Cruchot in the first film of the franchise. Gendarmes. It is she who therefore performs “Douliou Douliou Saint-Tropez” in the first opus, before appearing in the sequels, The Constable in New York (1965) and The Gendarme gets married (1968).
In the 1970s, Geneviève Grad’s career slowed considerably, before she abandoned cinema during the following decade. Subsequently, she was a production assistant on the Bogdanoff brothers’ television show, Time X. With one of the two twins, Igor Bogdanoff, she will have a son in 1976. For thirty years, however, she was married to Jean Guillaume.