Karine Le Marchand, star host of M6, hides a well-kept secret. Find out why she had to change her name at the last minute.
Karine Le Marchand is one of the most popular faces of the PAF. With her dazzling smile and her infectious good humor, she has been delighting viewers for more than 20 years, on France 5 in the show Kindergartens from 2004 to 2009, then on M6 since 2010, in Love is in the meadow and many other shows. The meeting which allows a handful of single farmers to find love is back this week, still with Karine Le Marchand on the microphone.
But what many don’t know is that Karine Le Marchand is not the real name of the bubbly 56-year-old presenter. Born to a French mother from Lorraine and a Burundian father, the one everyone knows under the name “Le Marchand” actually has another name in civilian life. “The Merchant” is in fact a pseudonym that she adopted in the mid-1990s, through an unusual combination of circumstances.
In 1995, the young Karine, then aged 27, was preparing to make her big debut as a columnist, during a live broadcast on France 3 Paris. Just a few minutes before his first appearance on the air, there was a twist: the director of the channel asked him to change his name at the last minute, considering his surname “unpronounceable”. Karine’s real name is Karine Mfayokurera. Parade of discrimination or, on the contrary, intolerance of difference?
Karine Le Marchand has never been on this ground in her explanations, confirming that her change of surname was the choice of her program director at the time, “Pierre Milli, whom I adore because he really helped a lot at the beginning. At the microphone of Europe 1, she was able to explain that the latter came down to the studio just before the live and told her: “But you can’t keep your name! Mfayokurera, no one will know how to pronounce it or write it so You choose something.” “But wait, it’s in ten minutes,” Karine Le Marchand would have retorted, to which her boss would have replied: “Well, choose, choose!”
In haste, she opts for the name of her companion at the time. A certain Pascal Le Marchand, to whom she says she is “always close” and who would be “very happy” with it. The presenter will regret this choice made in a hurry and that she would have liked to mature more. But not for long. This pseudonym pleases him today and has obviously ended up bringing him luck.
For the record, Karine Le Marchand could also have changed her first name. In several media, she explained that she had to be called Samantha in her youth, when she joined the Elite modeling agency. The casting already included three models named Karine… But would Samantha Le Marchand have had the same success on television?