“He wore his melancholy as elegance. It came from afar: a Parisian childhood, in a 16th arrondissement like Modiano, a youth of a well-bred boy, who admired General de Gaulle and at the same time and proudly claimed the surname of Mitterrand, and who would have to discover his homosexuality in a France where it was still sanctioned by the Penal Code.” It is through her words that the Minister of Culture pays tribute to one of her predecessors on rue de Valois, Frédéric Mitterrand who died at the age of 76.
Rachida Dati also talks about her film debut at age 12 alongside Bourvil and Michèle Morgan in Fortunat (1960). A taste for the seventh art which pushed him to take over ten cinemas, which became the Olympic cinemas. “The quality of their programming had made him a leading figure in the exploitation of arthouse cinema in Paris. The public rushed to the screenings of Bergman, Antonioni or Ozu, but also Hollywood melodramas or Egyptian musical comedies, as this mad lover of the black screen had such eclectic passion,” she continues, recalling that he was appointed in 2000 to head the French cinema advances on receipts commission. And in 1995, he even went behind the camera by adapting Madame Butterfly, the opera by Giacomo Puccini.
Before listing his radio and television shows, from “Étoiles et Toils”, from 1981 to 1986 to “Permission de midnight” from 1987 to 1988, via “Du Côt de Chez Fred”, between 1988 and 1991 or even “Night Caravan”. “The public loved his almost quaint sophistication, the particular tone of his voice, with which he expressed himself in chiseled French. ”Frédo” became one of our familiar figures, the one who knew so well how to talk to us about operas, crowned heads and Hollywood stars with flamboyant and shattered destinies and heartbreaking love stories, with a contagious greed, a sense innate to the formula and, sometimes, to the provocation.”
“In recent weeks, we have spoken several times. He gave me the warmest welcome when I took up my duties at Rue de Valois. Our last conversation, this weekend, full of this zest of life that we knew in him, gave nothing away to the time which was speeding up for him,” says the minister finally. And extends his most sincere condolences to “all those who, like me, remember today his deep humanity, his humor, his kindness, his gentleness, his constant attention to others, which he showed until his last breath. Many of us will remember Frédéric’s bright smile and the inimitable grain of his voice.”
