Laetitia Casta, back on the boards with “Prelude and Fugue”, recounts her relationship to the theater and this “special relationship with the public”.
“The stage is really a place where you throw yourself”: for her return to the theater, Laetitia Casta throws herself headlong into a single stage where she plays the virtuoso pianist Clara Haskil, but also about twenty other characters .
Each time, playing on stage represents for her “a big jump without a parachute”, affirms to AFP the actress, on display in Prelude and Fugue, at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, until January 23.
And “when we land at the end of a play, we feel like the end of a wonderful journey. This state is a kind of trance shared with the spectators. It’s very strong”, adds the actress who will leave on tour in France, Switzerland and Greece.
“Since my debut in the theater with Ondine by Jean Giraudoux in 2004, I discovered this special relationship with the public. The stage is really a place where we throw ourselves. The cinema does not allow this dialogue with the spectators”, she underlines.
“I understood that something was going on”
Laetitia Casta made her debut as a teenager as a model before revealing herself as a recognized actress, enlisted by the greatest directors including Raoul Ruiz and Patrice Leconte. Besides Ondine, she had acted in She is waiting for you by Florian Zeller (2008), French playwright who became world-renowned and Oscar-winning for his film The Father, and in Scenes from married life (2017) by Ingmar Bergman, directed by Safy Nebbou. It is also the latter who stages Prelude and Fugue, a play by Serge Kribus.
Accompanied by a few interludes on the piano, the actress recounts in the first person the life of the Romanian and Swiss pianist (1895-1960) as well as the characters she met on her way.
At the rise of the curtain, Laetitia Casta lies on stage. The pianist has just seriously injured herself by falling down the stairs of a train station in Brussels. The time of her agony, Clara Haskil reviews her existence, from her birth to her dearly won international triumph.
“After a chance meeting in a shop, an editor of the magazine Front Stage offered me this piece. I read it and I understood that something was going on. I was touched by Clara Haskil, her determination and what she was,” says Laetitia Casta.
“I like when the roles have important things to tell, which have meaning and make me grow. I receive a lot of proposals but these beautiful roles are rare”, she adds.
Muse of the great couturiers
Muse of the great couturiers, immortalized in “Marianne” of the year 2000, Laetitia Casta intends to “keep humor in relation” to her status as a popular icon.
“When I started, I was told that I was not up to the standards of what a model should be… Afterwards, I was told the opposite… I don’t believe everything they tell,” she said.
After a short film presented at Cannes in 2016, Laetitia Casta got down to a documentary of which she does not want to say anything “until it is not finished”.
“It’s nice to tell things differently. To tackle a feature film one day is another story”, specifies the actress who will be on February 23 on the poster of “According to the police”, by Frederic Videau.
Laetitia Casta, recently seen on the big screen as Guillaume Canet’s mistress in His and wife of Louis Garrel (her husband in the city) in The crusade, will start filming in the spring of the Happiness is for tomorrow, the story of an impossible love with a long-term prisoner.