“They served me wine, I was 15 years old.” Judith Godresh looks back on her relationship with the 40-year-old director.

Judith Godrech is currently promoting a new series on Arte, Icon of French cinema, in which he plays one of the key roles. We find it in the columns this Friday, December 8th He, in a lengthy interview in which she reveals herself, from her childhood, her beginnings in film, to her famous relationship with a man twenty-five years her senior when she was just 14 years old. This man, whose name he doesn’t mention, but who we can guess, is the film director Benoit Jaco.

“I was a very lonely, very idealistic young girl. I lived through books, my mother left home at the age of 9, I was raised by a single man, I was vulnerable despite a certain maturity,” he first explained. In 1988, she met the director on the set of his film Beggars, where he got his first leading role. She is 40 years old, she just turned 14. “As an actress, you need to be loved, looked at. It’s as if by choosing you, the director brought you to life.

“We’ll stop there”

Although the relationship lasted almost six years, Judith Godrech still explains that it was a painful affair for her. Moreover, he who had a very promising debut in the cinema, will slowly withdraw from it, as if to get rid of his lover. “Filming young people is extraordinary. The cinematic power of a teenage girl is inexhaustible. But you can make great movies without going so far as to sleep with your underage actress. For me, this becomes perversion. The position of an adult in society is to know where to draw the line, even when it comes to art. When you’re 15 and you’re doing a scene shirtless, there’s forty-five takes, you have to kiss a 45-year-old man, and that man is your director, it’s crazy that there’s no adult on set to say, “We will stop there.” »

Today, the 51-year-old actress and mother of two children is protesting against this system and the silence prevailing in the film world. In particular, he tells a memory during the Locarno festival. “I was there with my partner. I was served wine, I was 15 years old, I fell dead on the table, I vomited in front of everyone. In retrospect, I wonder if adults think: “There is a problem, he is very small, what is he doing there?” and adding: “If a 40-year-old man approaches my daughter, I will kill him. because I have a teenage daughter whom I am bringing to the realization of what has happened to me, to tell myself that I have navigated a world without rules and laws. I left school at 15, the stories we read, the movies we saw, everything contributed to that. The image of Lolita, a child’s doll.’

She, who has become a staunch woman, especially through her speech in the case of Harvey Weinstein, the American producer accused of raping multiple minors, has a message for young shoots starting in the profession: “We have to tell young people to be girls. careful. You can get caught in the net of a more powerful person, and art is an extremely favorable springboard for that.”