She’s the actress everyone is talking about. Laure Calamy, the leading face of French cinema, is on screen this Tuesday, May 30 on France 2 in the film Annie Colère, directed by Blandine Lenoir. In this fiction, the actress plays a working woman and mother who no longer wishes to have children, in the 1970s.
As she becomes pregnant for the third time, the heroine joins, on the advice of a co-worker, the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception (MLAC). A role explained by Laure Calamy. “In my character, there is a form of naivety”, she assures for the site of Allociné. “She comes from a modest background, she is not politicized and she will discover this collective before participating in it. It is an upheaval for her body and her mind”. Before taking on this role in this committed film, the actress had a complicated start to her career.
The only child of a doctor father and a nurse and psychologist mother, Laure Calamy was born in Orléans in 1975. Very early in her youth, she discovered her passion for the theatre. “At 4 years old, coming back from a circus show, I said to my mother: ‘I want to be a circus lady'”, according to remarks made in Version Femina. After having played in a play in summer camp, then discovered at Le Baladin college in the Western world, the young woman wishes to pursue a career in comedy.
“I wanted to get into the theater, but my father refused, I already had a lot of activities,” she told our colleagues. “I then kept my desire for comedy secret until my first theater lessons, arriving in Paris at 18. And when I got the Conservatoire, my father was reassured”. However, her beginnings were complicated and she faced injustice and sexism in the artistic world.
And, in particular, in terms of equal pay when Laure Calamy played in the theater. “I stepped up to the plate twice, because my partner was much better paid than me, for an equivalent role and experience,” she explained. “I managed to win my case the first time, not the second. I still haven’t digested it.” The actress will hold her revenge a few years later thanks to key and singular roles.
In 2015, Laure Calamy burst onto the television screen in Ten percent, the flagship series of France 2 where she played Noémie, assistant in the ASK agency and lover of Matthias Barneville (Thibault de Montalembert). An emblematic role in which she did not hesitate to expose herself during season 4.
Interviewed by the newspaper Le Parisien, the famous actress, who unveiled her panties at the Cannes Film Festival, spoke of her relationship to bare scenes throughout her career. “As for nudity, with theater I’m used to showing my whole body and telling stories with it. For me, it’s more immodest to say I love you in a scene than to to be filmed naked”. Far from being immodest, the actress Caesarized in 2021 for her first role in Antoinette in the Cévennes saw this coronation “as an encouragement, a recognition of the work done with the director Caroline Vignal and the entire film team”. A consecration that she shared with the man of her life.
Discreet about her private life, Laure Calamy makes rare revelations about her love situation. For Madame Figaro, the talented actress would no longer be a heart to take. “Today, she joins as soon as she can her companion, mountain guide, in his mazet in the Cévennes, where they live without water or electricity”, can we read in the magazine.
Happy with her companion away from media life, Laure Calamy does not want to have children. Nevertheless, close to “her son-in-law and her godson”, she evokes her reasons. “Children, when you’re with them, it’s a bubble, a shot of playfulness, of the present time. Where you forget precisely that the ideal, for the planet, would be to have fewer children…”. A committed actress who knows how to defend her convictions.
