This corporate author and ex-chief, father of the actress Anouk Grinberg, notably transposed the Bettencourt affair to the theater, and entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française in 2009 with “L’Ori ordinary”.
Le Monde with AFP
He led a double prolific life for almost thirty years: director of the company Gillette and theater author. Michel Vinaver – Grinberg of his real name – died on Sunday 1
This son of an antique dealer and a lawyer first wrote two novels before coming to the theater in 1955, two years after his hiring at Gillette – with whom he was first. “I had immediately excluded from depending on my literary production to live,” he confided to AFP in 2015.
His first pieces, the Koreans – created by Roger Planchon in 1956 – and the bailiffs have nothing to do with the life of this father of four children. “I had set myself a prohibition: not to talk about myself and my work,” he said. But after a few parts, it’s the inspiration. “I came out by raising this taboo”.
The central place of the company in his work
He then writes above edge, an epic of seven hours -Entertete included -, the history of the absorption of a French family company by an American multinational. Consequently, the company takes a central place in the work of the one who will be appointed three times to the Molières and winner of the Grand Prix of the Théâtre de l’Académie française in 2006.
Thus the room The works and the days takes place in the after-sales service of a manufacturer of coffee mills. In the job request, the main character is an unemployed framework. In the ordinary, entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française in 2009, the president of a multinational, his wife, his secretary and four vice-presidents survive a plane crash in the Andes Cordillera.
When Edwy Plenel, co -founder of the Mediapart site at the origin of numerous revelations on the Bettencourt affair the approach for an adaptation, Michel Vinaver judges the case “too abundant, with too many events, characters”. But he is caught up in the plot and passionate relationships between Liliane Bettencourt and his daughter Françoise, “characters from ancient tragedy”, according to him.
Bettencourt boulevard, or a history of France (created at the TNP of Villeurbanne) was thus created, in 2014. This mille-feuilles of family intrigue, devouring jealousies, of corruption on all floors develops, in short- Plan, a great story: that of the father of Liliane Bettencourt, Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal, who cultivated collaborationists during the war, and the Rabbi Robert Meyers, grandfather of the husband of Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, deported in Auschwitz.