A disappearance forever etched in his memory. During an interview with Isabelle Morizet, Saturday February 25, 2023 on Europe 1, Lambert Wilson returned to the death of Marie Trintignant. Shortly before his death, the actor indicates that he spent the night at his bedside, at the Vilnius hospital in Paris. While she was in a coma, her friend tried to soothe her by singing a little song to her. “I rushed to the hospital around 11:30 p.m. She was leaving. I started singing again, because in Vilnius I had sung anything…variety songs, advertising jingles… . you had to sing. There, I did that for seven hours”, he recalls.
And according to the words of Lambert Wilson, each time he pushed the song, the “oxygenation rate” of Marie Trintignant went up. “It gave me strength because I wanted her to come back up. (…) Marie definitely showed something that evening. Her body started to rise towards the surface and showed signs of life”. But the actress died shortly after, on August 1, 2003. The actor remembers that after singing for “seven hours”, he “collapsed” from fatigue.
The last moments spent at his bedside
Twenty years after the death of his friend, the pain is still strong for the actor. “I very rarely talk about Marie’s story. It was so intense and painful. I don’t really want to relive and talk about that episode,” concludes the actor. A few years ago, Lambert Wilson confided in this subject, when he came to the show Le Divan. He remembers the words of Marie Trintignant’s mother: “She said to me: ‘She loved it so much when you sang and it was so important at that time in Vilnius so come and sing’. So I sang for seven hours in a row in Marie’s last hours. And curiously, as she left completely, the oxygenation went back up and the surgeons said: ‘Yes, we know that we don’t know anything’ (…) J I understood what this passage was, accompanying people in this passage which does not scare me at all. I accompanied people in death. I accompanied Marie, I really, really accompanied. You could say that I was really there.”
Marie Trintignant © BERTRAND RINDOFF PETROFF
