“Being exposed has never been my thing” | EUROtoday

Many confided to me that that they had dared to broach sure topics with their household due to a program

“I think I planted some small stones. And, I say it without pretension, having opened spaces for speech,” feedback Mireille Dumas at the moment, who reveals herself within the metropolis as on the air: delicate, caring and interesting.

“Many confided to me that they had dared to broach certain subjects with their family thanks to a show,” she continues. The “enormous bags of letters” that had been then left every week in his places of work inform, in themselves, the media echo and the intimate resonance of those cathodic interviews. As for the report audiences on the time and the multitude of awards acquired, which at the moment adorn the small library on the entrance, she swears she takes no satisfaction in it. “Looking at these awards, I tell myself that I have worked a lot,” she says with a smile.

HIS IDEAL SUNDAY: Getting up late and having time for your self, studying books and listening to classical music or stunning operas, which she then activates “very loudly”. Then exit to see mates or take lengthy walks in Paris, alone or along with your husband. When they don’t seem to be in Corsica, his adopted land.

For good purpose, she is among the few to occupy, on the identical time, the three positions of producer, director and host. Leading the design of those weekly broadcasts from A to Z is then a assure of freedom. But she admits: “It was also very, very heavy. »

To the point of losing sleep. “I became insomniac in 1992, the year my company was created…” Hours stuffed, for a time, with video clips, documentaries of Hunting and fishing (“I was knowledgeable about trout fishing!”) and now studying, together with the novels of Patrick Modiano.

“My mother was the woman of my life”

We can't resist this hackneyed query: which interview had probably the most impression on Mireille Dumas? She first cites Valéry Giscard d'Estaing for his off-air antics – he mimed scenes on the phone, prompt that they name one another by their first names… – and his confidences concerning the solitude of energy. Then Bernard Giraudeau. We are in 2010, the actor died of most cancers three months later: “It was overwhelming. I knew he wouldn't come back. And I myself had difficulty putting an end to the interview…”

“Every time I received someone to talk about their imminent death, it was an ordeal,” she continues. Because somebody so worthy forces you to dwell as much as it, to not disintegrate, to be worthy too. » This topic can be one of many final taboos, observes Mireille Dumas. “I think it remains difficult to approach,” significantly relating to the selection of 1’s finish of life, she explains.

Godmother of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity (ADMD), the journalist makes no secret of her opinion on the problem. She sees on this selection the “ultimate freedom” and regrets “France’s delay in legislating”. She herself says she helped her 100-year-old mom go away. “She didn't want to know the agonies of the end, I had made her a promise. » A “gesture of love”, oh so tough. “My mother was the woman of my life. »

READ ALSO Meeting with Yves Jobic: “When I was a cop, we had a hunter mentality, not a civil servant” From this girl, a trainer of Italian origin, primarily based in Beauce, she will get her “independence” and this willingness to “talk about everything, without taboo”. “She was modest about her feelings, but knew how to put into words what had happened to a little girl from the village whom the gendarmes had come to take from her class because she had been raped by her father. »

“It was she who built me,” she sums up with tenderness. “She played all the roles: she was my teacher, my confidante and she replaced the father. » The latter died of an illness at the age of 38, when she was only three and a half years old. He leaves behind a family of six children.

I didn't feel the need to carry my child

Is it because she sees her mother carrying, alone, this family at arm's length that Mireille Dumas did not wish to be in turn? “There is trauma, it undoubtedly shaped me,” she admits. At the time, she was one of many few to simply accept her non-desire for motherhood.

“I didn’t feel the need to carry my child,” she explains merely. Her husband, director Dominique Colonna, had a son, Antoine, now deceased, whom she raised as her personal. “I gave him what I had to give him. Sometimes the bonds of the heart are more powerful than those of the blood…”

The one she prefers to name her “travel companion” has shared her life for 50 years. Faced with our enthusiasm, she tempers with fun: “The couple is not a long, quiet river. There are spaces of freedom between us, it's the secret of our longevity! »

As she prepares to return to her editing room, where she has just completed a portrait of the singer Hugues Aufray and is preparing a documentary on Paris, we talk one last time about her journey, and the way she sees it. “I’m not proud of it, I don’t like that word. But, and this is important, I would say that he looks like me…”

Every Sunday, The Point hasMeeting with… well-known and lesser-known personalities from the world of tradition, tv, cinema, gastronomy, sport, enterprise… They participate within the sport of intimate interviews, telling us about their journey, typically strewn with pitfalls, give us some confidences and provides us their imaginative and prescient of society.