The playwright died on Sunday at the age of 95. Nominated three times for the Molières, he was the winner of the Grand Prize for Theater of the French Academy in 2006.
The playwright and ex-entrepreneur Michel Vinaver, who had notably transposed the Bettencourt affair to the theater, died this Sunday in Paris at the age of 95, his daughter, actress Anouk Grinberg, announced to AFP. . The son of an antique dealer and a lawyer, Michel Vinaver led a double life for nearly 30 years: executive then director of Gillette and playwright.
Nominated three times for the Molières
He first wrote two novels before coming to the theater in 1955, two years after his hiring at Gillette. “I had ruled out from the outset to depend on my literary production to live”, he confided in 2015 His first plays, Corean people et The ushers have nothing to do with the executive life of this father of four children, including Anouk Grinberg.
“I had set myself a ban: not to talk about me and my work,” he told AFP. After a few parts, it’s the breakdown. “I came out of it by lifting this taboo”. He writes Overboard: the story of the absorption of a French family company by an American multinational.
From then on, the company took a central place in the work of the man who would be nominated three times for the Molières and winner of the Grand Prize for Theater of the French Academy in 2006.
Thereby, Works and Days takes place in the service department of a coffee grinder manufacturer. In The job application, the main character is an unemployed executive. In the ordinarywhich entered the Comédie-Française repertoire in 2009, the president of a multinational, his wife, his secretary and four vice-presidents survive a plane crash in the Andes mountain range.
Adaptation of the Bettencourt case
When Edwy Plenel, co-founder of the Mediapart site at the origin of many revelations on the Bettencourt affair, approaches him for an adaptation, Michel Vinaver judges the affair “too abundant, with too many events, characters”.
But he is caught up in the intrigue and the passionate relationship between Liliane Bettencourt and her daughter Françoise, “characters of ancient tragedy”, according to him. Result: Bettencourt Boulevard (created at the TNP in Villeurbanne), a mille-feuille of family intrigues, devouring jealousies, corruption at all levels.
With the great story in the background: Liliane Bettencourt’s father, Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal, cultivated collaborationist friendships during the war, and Rabbi Robert Meyers, grandfather of Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers’ husband , deported to Auschwitz.