Bourvil, Author and Performer
Reference R 35
BOURVIL, his songs, his monologues...laughter and emotion found again
55 pages, 20 songs, 10 monologues
Song line, lyrics, American chords
THE YEARS OF BOURVIL
Just 25 years ago, on September 23, 1970, Bourvil disappeared at his home on Boulevard Suchet after two years of fighting against illness with the stubbornness and courage of his Norman peasant heritage. Less than a month later his last two films, "The Atlantic Wall" and "The Red Circle", shot while he was already suffering terribly, were presented in Paris. What a prodigious end to his career - shooting with two great directors, Marcel Camus and Jean Pierre Melville - for André Raimbourg who had started out in the wedding dinners and dance halls of his commune: Bourville. It shows the exceptional talent of a man, a true artist, who had gradually overcome his modesty and reserve to expand his range and, in turn, become a public entertainer, a singer, a comic storyteller, a radio star, an operetta singer and a film actor, without ever losing his simplicity, his attention to others and his sense of friendship.
This versatility does not, however, prevent him from being dominant.
Until the 50s, these were truly "the Bourvil years": not only an interpreter but also an author, his songs and monologues finally made him known after a difficult start.
Between 50 and 60 the operetta confirms its success.
Then, from 1955, it is the film actor who emerges and triumphs.
It took courage for the baker's apprentice from Petit Quevilly to learn the accordion and then the cornet à piston, to discover music theory in the Fontaine le Dun brass band and then in the Rouen municipal band. In order to follow his vocation, he even went so far as to anticipate the call to enlist for three years as a trumpeter in the music of the 24th infantry regiment of Parts. He is 20 years old then, and will spend two years with his .......................................................
extract of the preface of the collection which tells the beginnings of Bourvil in the song with the Editions Fortin