Pascale de Boysson

Pascale de Boysson (16 April 1922 – 9 August 2002) was a French film, television and stage actress who also adapted and translated plays for the French stage. She was a two-time winner of the Molière Award, winning it in 1988 and posthumously in 2003. Born as Marie Thérèse Antoinette Pascale de Boysson in April 1922 at Château de Châtillon in the commune of Chindrieux, she was one of ten children born to the aristocratic Louis de Boysson (1881-1971), a Director of the Paris Railroad Company in Orléans who married Marie Jeanne d'Anglejan-Châtillon in 1912. She was a pupil of Charles Dullin and Tania Balachova. In 1961 after meeting Laurent Terzieff she became his life partner and led the company Terzieff founded in 1961. She starred in more than fifty plays and the show Le Babil des classes dangereuses, which she helped to create in January 1984.

She adapted works by Murray Schisgal, Arnold Wesker and Sławomir Mrożek and in 2003 she posthumously received a Molière Award as the best adapter of a foreign work for Le Regard by Murray Schisgal. She also appeared in more than thirty films or TV movies, and lent her voice to the film L'Histoire sans fin, the French-language version of The NeverEnding Story. Her film roles include Gasparine in Lovers of Paris (1957), the bar owner in Seven Days... Seven Nights (1960), Sister Cécile in Dialogue with the Carmelites (1960), La servante des Boule in Amelie or The Time to Love (1961), Elisabeth Lapeyre in Les Abysses (1963), Simone in The Shameless Old Lady (1965), Blanche in Le Maître de pension (1973), Véronique in Il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu (1973) and Mrs Clare in Tess (1979).

She died aged 80 on 9 August 2002 in La Noue and was buried at Coux-et-Bigaroque in the Dordogne.

Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the French Minister of Culture and Communication, paid homage to Pascale de Boysson on the day of her death:

"With Pascale de Boysson, we lose a great actress, but also a remarkable adaptator who had the rare gift of translating the foreign playwrights she loved to the French public, without ever betraying its character and genius. We waited with impatience to find her on the boards, at the beginning, in her adaptation of The Gaze by Murray Schisgal, an author who was particularly dear to her. Her meeting with Laurent Terzieff, her companion in the city as on the stage, was for her determining. For her, but also for the public, since this meeting was to be at the origin of a company that remains, 40 years after its foundation, one of the beautiful theatrical adventures of our time."

When the Molière Award was awarded to Pascale de Boysson a few months after her death, it was Laurent Terzieff who thanked the profession and paid tribute to the one who was his partner and companion:

"It is on the job, and often in a hurry, that, as part of her actress activities within our company, Pascale de Boysson has been brought to translate the texts of Schisgal, Saunders, Friel and others... She did so with both great humility and great ease, not looking for resemblance at all costs through agreed equivalences, but on the contrary imposing a difference, sometimes dissonances, by digging a groove in our language, enriching it with a new sound, the tone of the song of an author from elsewhere. It's still difficult for me to talk about Pascale. I feel the clumsiness of the burglar who would be forced to force his own safe, as it says somewhere in a novel by Faulkner. I will only say that I consider this prize as a last tribute of the profession to Pascale de Boysson, to that independent, generous and gratuitous life she had given herself."

On 2 July 2015 the place Laurent-Terzieff-and-Pascale-of-Boysson was inaugurated in Paris, in the 6th district.