Actress Catherine Samie, figure of the Comédie-Française, died at 92

The Comédie-Française loses one of its icons. Catherine Samie, who was an actress for half a century within the troupe, died during the night from Sunday to Monday in Paris, at the age of 92.

“She passed away quietly shaking her daughter’s hand,” Danielle Gain, Céline Samie’s agent, told AFP, confirming information from Le Figaro. “An extraordinary personality, exceptional actress, Catherine embodied the Comédie-Française. With her, it is a bit of the history of our House which disappears today,” wrote Clément Hervieu-Léger, general administrator of the public establishment, in a press release.

Joining the troupe in 1956, Catherine Samie played “more than seventy roles in half a century”, recalls the institution. She “fought to raise to the highest the values ​​of requirement and excellence which make up the Comédie-Française”, according to Clément Hervie-Léger.

“Inimitable voice” and “perfect diction”

Trained at the Dramatic Arts Center on Rue Blanche in Paris and then at the National Higher Drama Conservatory, the actress began playing the roles of servants in Molière (Dorine, Lisette, Zerbinette etc.) and Feydeau’s “cottes”, before broadening her range to include tragedy and contemporary theater.

She then plays Marivaux, Montherlant, Dostoyevsky, Mérimée, Rostand, Euripides, Beckett… She is for example Queen Elisabeth in “Richard III” by William Shakespeare by Terry Hands, also plays in “Savannah Bay” by Marguerite Duras (directed by Éric Vigner) or interprets, in a single-on-stage, the Mother, in “The Last Letter” by Vassili Grossman, by director Frederick Wiseman.

From 1989 to the end of 2006, the 438th member will remain dean of the theater, of which she was also the second woman to occupy the position of interim general administrator, in 1990. “We will remember with emotion her blue gaze with her laughing eye, so sharp and yet always a little distant (…), her inimitable voice and her perfect diction. We will remember her arms wide open and her hands outstretched forward, as if she were embracing all of us in the same breath, our future and our ghosts,” said Clément Hervieu-Léger.

An honorary member, she left the house in 2007, returning once in 2012 to play Ase in “Peer Gynt” by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Éric Ruf. She also acted in the cinema, appearing in front of the camera of Julien Duvivier, Josiane Balasko, Michel Audiard, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Coline Serreau.

The one who received an honorary Molière in 1998 was notably distinguished as a grand officer of the Legion of Honor and commander in the Order of Arts and Letters.