Danièle Lebrun

Danièle Lebrun is a critically acclaimed leading actress of the French stage. It could be said that her career began when her older brother, the philosopher Gérard Lebrun (1930-1999), introduced her to the director Claude Autant-Lara. Lara deemed her as too young to be cast in his film Le blé en herbe (1954), but, nonetheless, encouraged her acting ambitions. Lebrun soon made her first theatrical appearance in Arthur Miller 's The Crucible at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt under the direction of Raymond Rouleau. She subsequently studied drama at the Conservatoire, won first prize for acting and then joined the Comédie-Française for two years. In the course of six decades, she has since acted in numerous classic plays by Molière, Pirandello, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and others, collecting a Critics Union Award in 1976 for her role in Madame de Sade and two Molière Awards (1992 and 2006), respectively, for performances in Le Misanthrope and George Bernard Shaw 's Pygmalion. She rejoined the Comédie-Française in 2011.

Infrequently on the screen during the 60s, Lebrun had her first leading role at the end of the decade as Grushenka in a French TV version of Les frères Karamazov (1969). Since the 70s, she has become an audience favorite in literary adaptations and period dramas (again on the small screen), notably as Baronness Roxane de Saint-Gély in Marcel Bluwal's series Les nouvelles aventures de Vidocq (1971) and in the title role of Bérénice (1975), queen of Judaea, based on a tragedy by 17th-century playwright Jean Racine. She has also portrayed Empress Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte's first wife, in the biopic Joséphine ou la comédie des ambitions (1979), and Napoleon's mother Maria-Letizia Bonaparte (also known as "Madame Mère") in the comedy Madame Sans-Gêne (2002). More recently, Lebrun portrayed the wife of Charles de Gaulle, Yvonne, in a two-part miniseries, Madame Cuchet, one of the murder victims of French Bluebeard Désiré Landru (2005), and Emilienne, one of a quartet of pensioners trying to recapture the adventures of their youth by masterminding a robbery of their retirement home, in Les vieux calibres (2013) (again directed by her husband Marcel Bluwal).

Danièle Lebrun's first marriage was to the journalist François de Closets. Her second husband was the aforementioned film maker Marcel Bluwal who often directed her on the screen. He died in 2021.