Pascale de Boysson

Pascale de Boysson (16 April 1922 – 9 August 2002) was a French film, television and stage actress who also adapted and translated plays for the French stage. She was a two-time winner of the Molière Award, winning it in 1988 and posthumously in 2003.

Born as Marie Thérèse Antoinette Pascale de Boysson in April 1922 at Château de Châtillon in the commune of Chindrieux, she was one of ten children born to the aristocratic Louis de Boysson (1881-1971), a Director of the Paris Railroad Company in Orléans who married Marie Jeanne d'Anglejan-Châtillon in 1912. She was a pupil of Charles Dullin and Tania Balachova. In 1961 after meeting Laurent Terzieff she became his life partner and led the company Terzieff founded in 1961. She starred in more than fifty plays and the show Le Babil des classes dangereuses, which she helped to create in January 1984.

She adapted works by Murray Schisgal, Arnold Wesker and Sławomir Mrożek and in 2003 she posthumously received a Molière Award as the best adapter of a foreign work for Le Regard by Murray Schisgal. She also appeared in more than thirty films or TV movies, and lent her voice to the film L'Histoire sans fin, the French-language version of The NeverEnding Story. Her film roles include Gasparine in Lovers of Paris (1957), the bar owner in Seven Days... Seven Nights (1960), Sister Cécile in Dialogue with the Carmelites (1960), La servante des Boule in Amelie or The Time to Love (1961), Elisabeth Lapeyre in Les Abysses (1963), Simone in The Shameless Old Lady (1965), Blanche in Le Maître de pension (1973), Véronique in Il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu (1973) and Mrs Clare in Tess (1979).

She died aged 80 on 9 August 2002 in La Noue and was buried at Coux-et-Bigaroque in the Dordogne.

Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the French Minister of Culture and Communication, paid homage to Pascale de Boysson on the day of her death:

When the Molière Award was awarded to Pascale de Boysson a few months after her death, it was Laurent Terzieff who thanked the profession and paid tribute to the one who was his partner and companion:

On 2 July 2015 the place Laurent-Terzieff-and-Pascale-of-Boysson was inaugurated in Paris, in the 6th district.