Sophie Marceau: 'If I hadn't known how to defend myself, many things would have happened to me' (2024)

Sophie Marceau's list of accomplishments is long: success at the age of 14 with La Boum ("The Party," 1980); an unrivaled status as France's most popular actress, having starred in some 50 films; an international aura; and two books including a collection of short stories, La Souterraine, which she has just published. But still, the 56-year-old has a background that sets her apart, that of a little girl from a modest background who became a star without losing her head.

I wouldn't have gotten here if...

... If I hadn't absolutely wanted to work at the age of 12. I wanted to earn a bit of money, but above all I wanted to be independent. I've always believed that work is the key to self-fulfillment, and it had a very important place in my family. For me, the adult world was the world of work, and I wanted to be an adult.

Did you dream of a specific job? Did you have a particular vocation?

No, not at all. For me, you learn by doing. I come from a working-class background, so I had no idea that you could study. What's more, I wasn't scholastic. I couldn't read instructions; but I knew how to adapt, how to imitate the necessary actions and gestures.

Didn't your parents have any plans for you either?

They wanted me to have a job, a family and to be responsible, but they didn't have the skills or the means to put me through school. But that wasn't a problem: There's always a way to get by in life.

It's quite rare to answer that question in such a prosaic way. It's easier to talk about a talent, an education, a mentor...

Yes, I can imagine that. But it's also because we scare people with how we talk about working life. Today, work is presented as servitude rather than fulfillment. The world of work has become depersonalized, but at the time, what I saw with my parents was quite concrete. You knew who your boss was and you were connected. The world of cinema has also become more impersonal. You don't really know who the producer is or who is making the decisions, you're just a pawn. I didn't have that feeling before. Maybe it was an illusion, but I thought that to work was to be considered.

What kind of work could you find at 12?

I went to the stores, to the markets. I'm from a generation where you could start working at 13. My mother saw an ad in the paper for a children's modeling agency. We went there the following week.

And then you found yourself trying out for La Boum. Did you realize right away that your life was about to change?

I experienced it first-hand! My whole life changed. It was quite a shock. All of a sudden, my world and even my name changed. I was no longer Sophie Maupu, a girl raised in the suburbs. In that kind of situation, you mature faster. In reality, though, it wasn't so much me that was changing, it was the way other people looked at me. There was suddenly a filter between me and them, the Sophie Marceau filter. For the people I knew, my sudden celebrity status came as a real surprise, and those I didn't know were addressing my image without worrying about who I really was. In short, there was a kind of misunderstanding. Or rather, I was two people: little Sophie, who still hadn't finished growing up, and the famous Sophie on whom everyone projected their own fantasies because that's what we always do with our idols.

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