Model, actress, singer, nightclub owner, rose seller: under the spotlights and strobe lights or in her flower shops, Danièle Graule, known as Dani, will have lived several lives in one. Died in the night from Monday to Tuesday at the age of 77, she was also, we know less, a faithful supporter of Red Star, a football club more than a century old based in Saint-Ouen since 1909.
In 2018, the artist had agreed to pose with an official outfit recognizable by his logo, a red star on a white background surrounded by a green circle. In the photo that accompanies the condolence message posted by the club on Twitter, this Tuesday morning, we see Dani sitting in the stands of the Bauer stadium.
“What I love about this club is its very classy logo, but above all its stadium,” she confided to “L’Équipe” in an interview three years ago. It’s a venue on a human scale, where you feel a form of festive simplicity, popular warmth, humility… I’ve seen hundreds of matches there and, to be honest, I’ve forgotten most of them. . »
Also in 2019, the icon of the sixties and seventies had graciously lent his gravelly voice to the short film which accompanied the launch of a “third jersey”, in fact a simple tattoo. A publicity stunt then thought of as a counterpoint to a fashion that had become a “commercial temptation”. “The political dimension of Red Star, I don’t care,” confided Dani in the columns of the sports daily.
David Bellion has fond memories of his encounter with the artist. The former Manchester United and Girondins de Bordeaux striker now serves as creative director at Red Star, where he ended his professional career in 2016. It was he who thought of calling on this loyal supporter at the start of the 2018-2019 season.
” President (Patrice Haddad) told me about her one day, he recalls. She often came to Bauer, sometimes alone. At the end of the shoot, she offered to go out for a drink and lunch. We went to eat and have a drink in a restaurant in Saint-Ouen. With Pascale Savary (his partner), we had the honor of listening to Dani tell us lots of great anecdotes. She told us about her roses, Helmut Newton, Serge Gainsbourg and the nightclub she ran in the 1970s, where the Greens of Saint-Étienne came to party. »
“The enthusiasm of the supporters warms my heart”
Nothing predestined this native of Castres (Tarn) to fall in love with a football club in the northern suburbs of Paris. The love story begins to be written in the 1950s.
“I grew up in Perpignan and my father, who liked the Red Star, took me to see my first football match around 1955, she said in this same interview. I was 10, 11 years old. It was, unsurprisingly, a Perpignan – Red Star match. The two teams were then playing in the second division. During a stay in Paris, his father, a shoe merchant by profession, then introduced him to the Bauer stadium.
Years later, it was while strolling through the flea markets of Saint-Ouen that Dani stumbled upon the enclosure of the Audonian club… and rediscovered the fervor of his childhood. “I’m going back to Bauer with pleasure because the enthusiasm of the supporters warms my heart,” she said again. Sometimes I attend the matches near President Haddad, other times I am in the middle of the supporters, with the smell of fries and merguez…”