Former French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand, who was a prominent and sometimes controversial figure on the French cultural scene, died on Thursday at the age of 76, his family announced.
Mitterrand was born in Paris in 1947 to a well-off family, and was the nephew of President François Mitterrand.
His many activities over half a century have included a teacher, art cinema owner, film and cultural commentator, television presenter, producer and documentary filmmaker.
He first gained notoriety on the French cultural scene as the owner of the bohemian cinema “L’Olympic” in the 14th arrondissement of Paris and then in the 14th arrondissement.
After a brief spell as a geography and history teacher, he took up the stage in 1971 at the age of 22 with the help of a loan from the father of one of his former pupils.
It gained folkloric status for its mixed clientele of locals, cinephiles, neighborhood bandits, drag queens and the occasional movie star and auteur-director of the day.
Over the next fifteen years, Mitterrand built a small artistic arena under the banner L’Olympic, but lost ground in 1986 due to financial mismanagement.
Mitterrand’s entry into the exhibition sector was driven by his lifelong passion for cinema and his desire to make films himself.
He fulfilled the latter ambition in 1981 with his first film From somalia with love (Love letters in Somalia)a hybrid work depicting Somalia with voiceovers of love letters written to a lost lover.
His other credits included the 1995 musical film Madam Butterflywhich was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics for the United States, as well as biographical documents dedicated to Grace Kelly, Lana Turner and Christian Dior.
At the same time, Mitterrand was building his career as a television commentator on film and culture, where he started with… Eatwells and Toiles On TF1. This was the first of dozens of mainly cinematic-themed shows in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the 2000s, he began to take on more corporate roles.
He carried out cultural missions in Tunisia and Morocco, and was briefly president of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici in 2008, before he was appointed Minister of Culture and Communications in the center-right government led by François Fillon and headed by Nicolas Sarkozy.
He served in the position from 2009 to 2012, and was one of France’s longest-serving culture ministers in a position characterized by high turnover.
Sarkozy’s new wife at the time, Carla Bruni, is said to have supported Mitterrand.
He later said he barely knew the former model and singer, but suggested that their mutual friends, director and model Farida Khelfa and fashion icon Inès de la Fressange, may have helped his case.
Mitterrand was also one of the country’s first openly gay public figures and ministers, coming out publicly with his 2005 autobiographical account. Bad life.
This action would put him in an embarrassing situation after he was condemned by far-right politician Marine Le Pen a few months after taking over the ministry in 2009 due to a passage in which the narrator talks about paying money to have sex with boys during a trip to Thailand.
Mitterrand was already at the center of a political storm sparked by anger over an impassioned speech in defense of Roman Polanski a few weeks ago, following the director’s detention at Zurich airport at the request of US authorities in connection with pending 1977 rape charges.
He maintained his position amid calls for his resignation and issued a public statement strongly denying that he had paid for sex with underage boys and rejecting claims that the book justified sex tourism.
Mitterrand, who died after a short battle with cancer, remained a high-profile figure until the end of his life. His last work was a biography of Brad Pitt, titled Brad, of whom Mitterrand was a long-time admirer.
As part of the promotion, published at the same time as he announced his cancer diagnosis, Mitterrand dressed as the star for a photo shoot for Paris Match magazine.
“I wrote a book about Brad Pitt because I love him. He has the fragility of real men who know how hard life is. Periods of dark depression — I suffer from them too. Writing about him is a way to share them,” he explained at the time.
“I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me, and we’ve never met, but perhaps he stops for a moment when he discovers this message in a bottle, realizing that he has a friend somewhere in France who loves and admires and understands him.”