VALERY HACHE via Getty Images
DEATH – Actress Charlotte Valandrey, consecrated by the film Red Kiss in 1985 and who had made public his seropositivity and her heart transplant problems, died on Wednesday July 13 at the age of 53, her agent and her family told AFP.
She revealed her HIV status in 2005 with her autobiography love in the blood, a big bookstore success (180,000 sales) then adapted into a TV movie. Her triple therapy had exhausted her heart and she had recourse to a transplant in 2003, which made her the first HIV-positive heart transplant patient in France.
In 2008, she suffered a heart attack, her heart stopping beating for 22 seconds. And recently, she had announced on social networks that her second heart was coming to an end and that she needed a new transplant. “Waiting for my 3rd”, she wrote on Instagram on June 8.
“On June 14, Charlotte had to have emergency surgery to replace her ‘second-hand heart’ as she called it, but this new transplant did not take, this third heart did not live,” explained her daughter, her sister and her father in a statement sent to AFP.
Star at 17 with Red Kiss
Charlotte Valandrey is not yet 17 when she leaves Red Kiss, the film that made her the new star. She embodies, in France during the Cold War, Nadia, a young rebel who militates in the Young Communists and sees her ideal waver after a romantic encounter (Lambert Wilson). He was then predicted a destiny Sophie Marceau.
It was a few days before she turned 18 that she learned that she had contracted the HIV. With a “gothic prince”, member of a famous rock band, she will only say.
She is not selected for white wedding (1989), after sharing the secret of his illness with the director. His filmography is then far from the glory that he was promised. His career will be mainly on television playing from 1991 to 2000 in the series Les Cordiers, judge and cop (up to 11.4 million viewers) or in tomorrow belongs to us (2017-2019).
The TF1 group, broadcaster of these series, expressed its “deep sadness”.
Charlotte Valandrey must be “buried in privacy in Pléneuf-Val André”, a Breton town where she spent vacations during her childhood and which inspired her artist name, her relatives announced. A religious ceremony will take place in September in Paris.
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