DISAPPEARANCE – cactus flower, Adele’s Gift, Potiche… The author has written around thirty plays and formed, with Pierre Barillet, a mythical duo.
The playwright Jean-Pierre Grédy, who for decades formed a successful tandem of boulevard theater with Pierre Barillet, who died in 2019, died at the age of 101. “His last thoughts will have been for his family and friends who have given him a good life” write his relatives in the Carnet du Figaro. His funeral “took place as he wished in the strictest family intimacy” they continue, the exact date not having been indicated.
The son of an import-export professional, Jean-Pierre Grédy was born in Alexandria (Egypt) in 1920. A pupil in a Jesuit college, he obtained a degree in literature and law. He began his career in the cinema, where he wrote film scripts. At the end of the 1940s, an encounter would change his life, that of Pierre Barillet. From 1948, they write vaudeville Adele’s Gift, which will exceed one thousand performances and receives the Tristan-Bernard prize. Thanks to this success, Grédy abandons the cinema, in favor of the theater.
Together, they will become an emblematic duo of boulevard theater, made popular thanks to television, and will sign around thirty plays, some of which have been translated abroad. their room Forty carats (1965) was played on Broadway, by Julie Harris on stage and then by Liv Ullmann in a film adaptation. Jean-Pierre Grédy also led a solo career, writing ballets and song lyrics.