Best-selling French writer Dominique Lapierre is dead at 91 on the Côte d’Azur, announced his widow, Sunday, December 4, in the regional daily Was-Matin. “He died of old age”explained Dominique Conchon-Lapierre, confident in this interview to be “in peace and serenity since Dominique no longer suffers”.
Dominique Lapierre, who was also a journalist at Paris Match, lived in Ramatuelle (Var) near Saint-Tropez for about sixty years. A long time ago occupied a residence separated by a tennis court from that of the American Larry Collins (died in 2005), with whom he wrote Is Paris burning? (1964).
This account of the Liberation of Paris, on August 25, 1944, will be read by 20 million readers in thirty international editions and brought to the cinema in 1966 by René Clément with a host of stars such as the Frenchman Jean-Paul Belmondo or the American Kirk Douglas. Americans Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal co-wrote the screenplay.
After Is Paris burning?he continued his fruitful collaboration with Collins: where you will mourn me (1968) with the bullfighter El Cordobes, O Jerusalem (1972), Tonight freedom (1975) on Indian independence, The Fifth Horseman (1980) a fiction around an atomic bomb, and the thriller Is New York Burning? (2004). In total, he sold with his American “pen brother” some 50 million copies of their six novels.
A lover of India
Dominique Lapierre was as much a successful writer as a philanthropist. After writing alone The City of Joy (1985) about a slum in Calcutta, he donated a good part of his royalties to the poor people who had inspired him. The novel has sold millions of copies and was the subject of a film directed by Roland Joffé in 1992.
In 2005, this passionate about India ensured that, thanks to his royalties, donations from readers and earnings from lectures given all over the world, his humanitarian action “had made it possible to cure one million tuberculosis patients in twenty-four years, treat 9,000 leprosy children, build 540 drinking water wells and equip four hospital ships on the Ganges delta in India”.
Dominique Lapierre also co-wrote, with the Spaniard Javier Moro It was five past midnight in Bhopal (2001) and, with Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini, Once upon a time in the USSR (2005).
Born on July 30, 1931 in Châtelaillon (Charente-Maritime), the writer had been a resident for a few years in an Ehpad (accommodation establishment for dependent elderly people) in the town of Sainte-Maxime, according to the newspaper.