A French star brings her career-saving play to New York
In 2003, thirty years into her career, Dominique Blanc experienced every actor’s worst nightmare: the phone stopped ringing.
Approaching fifty, she was one of France’s most celebrated artists, fresh from an acclaimed stage performance in a classical tragedy. Jean Racine’s ‘Phèdre’. But the subsequent, years-long lack of offers “deeply upset me,” Blanc said in a recent interview. “I found myself in extreme loneliness. I truly believed that I would never be able to step foot on a stage again.”
“La Douleur,” a electrifying, award-winning one-woman show making its U.S. premiere at New York’s FIAF Florence Gould Hall on March 13, became a way to process the pain and take charge. Taken from a book by French author Marguerite Duras, Blanc’s character awaits her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, unsure if he is still alive.
The show grew out of a series of readings she did from the book with longtime collaborator director Patrice Chéreau. In 2008, Blanc pitched him a light stage version, which only required a table, chairs and old costumes from Blanc’s closet. While Duras’ book was translated into English as ‘The War: A Memoir’, the original title simply means ‘Pain’, and in her show Blanc starkly recreates the fear of women as their partners return from untold horrors.
“It was the first time that I was all alone on stage, with this special yet difficult text. I had so much fear,” Blanc said. “But it saved me.”
For several years, Blanc reclaimed her artistic agency by performing “La Douleur” in theaters, gymnasiums and prisons, both in France and abroad. In 2022, as the theater world prepared for the tenth anniversary of Chéreau’s death, the production was revived.
“The plan is to keep doing it until the end of my life, but we’ll see where I stand,” Blanc, now 67, said with a smile.
The production is a testament to Blanc’s ability to forge a lasting career in a performance landscape that has often felt hostile to her – even as her distinctive talent has been recognized. With her softly round features and kind eyes, Blanc has long been a familiar face in France, working steadily in film, television and theatre.
Yet it is in the aftermath of “La Douleur,” at an age when roles for women are generally shrinking, that she has experienced the most productive chapter of her career.
In 2016, she joined the Comédie-Française, France’s most illustrious theater company, where she has become an important player in the repertoire. Last year she became the first actress on the core syllabus for all French high school students studying theater.
Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux, who has known Blanc since the 2000s, said the artist has inspired unusual “love” among the French public. “She fought through thick and thin to become an actress,” says Ernaux. “She can play anything, and at the same time there is something accessible, something moving about her.”
Some of Blanc’s challenges reflected the expectations placed on female artists in her 20s and 30s. Thierry Thieû Niang, a choreographer who collaborated with Blanc and Chéreau on “La Douleur,” said that early in her career “people thought Dominique didn’t have the physique of an actress, so she wasn’t cast in archetypal female roles.” But she had a drive, a very special presence that I see in her to this day.
Blanc’s drive was partly born of necessity. While she grew up in a bourgeois family in Lyon, her conservative parents steadfastly refused to let her act. His father, a gynecologist, “never accepted it,” she said. “He refused to see my films.”
Unsure of what to do after high school, Blanc briefly considered becoming a psychiatrist before studying architecture in Lyon for two years. She then left for Paris, under the pretext of attending another architecture program, and then secretly studied acting at the Cours Florent, a prestigious private school. While there, a teacher told Blanc, without explanation, that she wouldn’t find success until she was thirty.
When her parents found out she was studying acting, they cut her off financially. For the next five years, Blanc took whatever jobs she could find: selling life insurance over the phone, modeling for painters, dog sitting, babysitting. François Florent, director of the Cours Florent, hired her as a cleaner: “I cleaned the bathrooms, the whole school. For me it was great because he trusted me,” Blanc said.
Yet the doors to professional acting remained closed. Three years in a row, Blanc failed the audition for the Paris Conservatoire, an art school seen as the golden path to a career in France. “It was very painful because it felt like the profession didn’t want me,” Blanc said. Women, she added, had to fit a certain physical shape.
It didn’t help that Blanc came of age in the 1980s, an era of French cinema that has come under increased scrutiny since last year due to its level of misogyny and sexual abuse. French actress Judith Godrèche, then a teenage star, led a wave of revelations when she accused two film directors of sexual assault. One of them was Benoît Jacquot, 25 years her senior, with whom Godrèche had a six-year relationship that started when she was 14.
“It was a very patriarchal, very traditional industry,” Blanc said. “At that time I had to put aside my feminist beliefs.” On the set of one of her first TV productions, when she was about 25, Blanc said she was asked out of the blue to strip naked for an intimate scene with a well-known performer. “I was a beginner, I didn’t know anyone. I said yes,” she said. “And that same night the famous man tried to break into my room. I was lucky that the door held up.”
On another occasion, she almost swore off cinema completely after working with respected director Jean-Luc Godard. She was hired as an extra for his film ‘Passion’ and immediately complained to Godard after being removed from a scene. “I had no idea how to behave towards the ‘god,’ and I told him I really needed the money it represented,” Blanc said. Godard put her back in and then “hurled insults at me for a whole day as we filmed it over and over again.” I was terrified.”
Looking back on the experiences of women working in French cinema, “it’s amazing what we’ve experienced,” Blanc said.
Chéreau, the director of “La Douleur,” was the first high-profile figure to offer Blanc a lifeline. In 1981 he hired her to play a small role in Ibsen’s ‘Peer Gynt’, and this collaboration was the beginning of a long-lasting creative relationship, which included both plays and films. In the 1990s, Blanc appeared in two of Chéreau’s best-known feature films, ‘Queen Margot’ and ‘Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train’, and became in demand on screen, working with directors James Ivory, Louis Malle and Agnieszka Holland .
Mainstream fame came in 1996 with ‘The King’s Way’, a highly successful TV film by Nina Companeez, in which she played Madame de Maintenon, a noblewoman who secretly married King Louis XIV. “People stopped me in the street to bow,” Blanc said with a delighted laugh. At the time, television work in France was still considered less serious acting. “But it allowed us to be in people’s homes, in their living rooms,” Blanc said.
Likewise, Blanc has never tried to establish himself as merely a leading star. Of the four César awards – the French equivalent of the Oscars – she won three for supporting roles, and she has never turned her back on smaller roles. “It’s terrible because I like everything,” she said, chuckling.
This ethos has served her well at the Comédie-Française, which she joined in 2016. At almost 60 years old, Blanc’s move was surprising: the century-old company typically hires up-and-coming actors, rather than established stars; the tempo of the repertoire system is intense. “I wondered if I would be up to the task. Everyone here is an athlete,” Blanc said in her quiet dressing room at the theater.
Yet Blanc flourished there and worked with a long list of leading directors, including Ivo van Hove, Lars Norén and Julie Deliquet. “I feel like I have learned more in eight years than in the rest of my performing career. I’m very spoiled,” Blanc said.
Léonidas Strapatsakis, who worked as an artistic advisor at the group until 2022, said that when Blanc “starts rehearsals for a new production, you would think she is a young actress who has not done anything yet: she is open to everything.”
Balancing the community she has found at the Comédie-Française with the autonomy she has in “La Douleur” has been a “selfish ideal,” Blanc said. Reviving the 2008 production was an unusual undertaking in contemporary theater, where shows typically close after the death of a director.
“It was a tribute to Chéreau, of course,” she said, adding that his trust in her, at one of her lowest points, “gave me a lot of self-confidence, and I needed that.”
The New York premiere of ‘La Douleur’ was initially planned for the early 2000s, but a ‘health scare’ prevented Blanc from traveling at the time. The two performances at the FIAF Florence Gould Hall provide a rare opportunity to see Blanc – a French star who hasn’t quite made the leap to international fame – on stage in the United States.
“Dominique was always a great actress, but I think now she is even more free, fulfilling and creative,” said Thieû Niang, co-director of “La Douleur.”
Over the past few years, “I have felt extremely happy,” Blanc said. “Acting really saved my life.”