Tag: Call My Agent!

Liliane Rovère (Call My Agent!): The day Chet Baker’s wife pointed her with a gun

On the occasion of the release of her book, La folle vie de Lili , Liliane Rovère revealed a funny anecdote about her relationship with Chet Baker in the columns of the Parisian .

Liliane Rovère lived “an eventful life” . She tells her story in her autobiography, La folle vie de Lili , published by Robert Laffont on Thursday, April 11. For the occasion, the one who plays Arlette in Dix Pour Cent has agreed to return to a few passages from her book, in the columns of the Parisian .

The 86-year-old actress took the opportunity to reveal an astonishing anecdote about her past relationship with Chet Baker. In the 1950s, while living in New York, the aspiring actress had a mad passion with the illustrious jazz trumpeter, whom she met in a bar. “Love at first sight was for him, I let myself be carried by the flow, passive and delighted at the same time. He was a handsome boy (…) teenage style, a little thug,” she explains. Handsome boy, yes, but above all married. Very jealous, his wife even comes to point at Liliane Rover with a revolver: “I must have smiled stupidly, telling me that she was not going to shoot, I was not afraid, and at the same time …” .

As the daily relates, she ultimately did not shoot. But Chet Baker preferred to divorce him to join his beautiful, that he even takes with him on tour. However, this love story is far from idyllic for the young woman. “We hardly knew each other. We made love a lot, but without complicity,” she adds. Two years after their meeting, their relationship ends. Today she no longer idealizes him and thinks of him “with affection, and a little sadness too” , she confides. “It was excessive and was to the end,” she concludes. Chet Baker died in 1988, aged just 58, after falling out of a window in his room on the second floor of a hotel.

Google translation from Femmeactuelle: Liliane Rovère (Ten percent): the day Chet Baker’s wife pointed her with a gun: Femme Actuelle Le MAG

Call My Agent: the French TV hit that viewers and actors adore

The comedy, whose fourth series hits Netflix this week, shows France’s TV can match its film

Fast approaching 50 and fed up after two exhausting decades at Artmedia, the top talent agency in Paris, Dominique Besnehard decided, one day in 2005, that he would quite like to turn his hand to producing something of his own.

“At the time,” Besnehard told Le Monde, “Desperate Housewives was all over the telly, a huge success. I just thought, with a couple of colleagues, we could maybe make a series a bit like that, but about the job we do for a living.”

Call My Agent, whose fourth series starts on Netflix this week, is now a huge hit – and has, along with Spiral and The Bureau, two other acclaimed series, fully and perhaps finally disproved the dictum that France is as bad at TV drama as it is good at cinema.

“France is really benefiting from a global trend in TV series towards strong, original, local stories, anchored in their territory and free of American and British norms,” said Laurence Herszberg, director of the international Series Mania festival.

The show, she said, was so big because it was “set in a milieu we don’t know well but would like to; because the agents are sympathetic and passionate and people like them even more than the guest stars; because it’s very French – it’s in Paris, it has office love affairs … And because it’s on Netflix.”

Call My Agent, whose French title is Dix pour Cent (for the 10% fee French agents charge actors), draws between 3 and 4 million viewers on public broadcaster France 2 and is available around the world on the streaming service.

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Why Call My Agent Is Your New TV Fashion Fix

Killing Eve withdrawal? Pencil in some time for Call My Agent

BY KATE FINNIGAN

Those still craving the TV fashion fix of Killing Eve might currently find some box-set style satisfaction in Call My Agent! (Dix Pour Cent), the hit French comedy drama on Netflix. Set in a Parisian talent firm called ASK, it follows four agents dealing with the dramatic highs and lows of representing the biggest stars in France – Isabelle Adjani, Juliette Binoche and Monica Bellucci and dozens of other actors happily send themselves up in the show.

Fast-paced and funny, it’s been going since 2015 with the third series just released this month (only six episodes per season, so easy to catch up). And while clothes are incidental to the show – which deals not only with diva strops and demanding directors but also equal pay, sexism, racism and the comic hell of office romance – the female characters’ chic Parisian style is a pleasing bonus and one we’re taking hard note of for office dressing inspiration. Here’s a quick guide to the key players and their style before you settle in.

Andréa Martel

The style star of the show is the badass agent played by Camille Cottin, who tells it like it is, parties like its 1999 and is a serial womaniser. A die-hard Parisian (her response to finding herself in the countryside with no phone reception is to call the police) she’s blessed with great hair and the legs of Emmanuelle Alt. Her uniform is modern French Vogue to a (slubby V-neck) T: skinny jeans, stiletto-heeled ankle boots, sharp navy and black blazers and a slouchy black leather tote. By night she goes for back-bearing dresses, ramping it up with gold sequined hot pants and a waist-coat, garnished with a bow-tie (only in Paris) for a party at a theatre, and a cool metallic shift dress by Martin Grant for the Cannes opening ceremony. Did I mention she has great legs?

Colette Brancillon
2/7

Colette Brancillon

In series one, Andréa becomes besotted with the uptight tax auditor Colette (Ophélia Kolb). Colette does excellent trench coat and fierce pony tail for work but transforms into a pre-Raphaelite goddess in soft cashmeres at home.

Sofia Leprince
3/7

Sofia Leprince

Receptionist and aspiring actress Sofia (Stéfi Celma) rocks a natural afro and has a smile like Julia Roberts. Whether doing the post round for her ungrateful colleagues or legging it to auditions with vile, racist/sexist directors, she’s an athleisure devotee in trainers, leggings and racer-back vests. Watch her style evolve into rich tonal colours and knee-high boots in series three as she starts to find success.

Camille Valentini
4/7

Camille Valentini

Fanny Sidney’s new-girl-in-town arrives in series one in dreary pastels and purple Converse, but when she snags a job as Andréa’s assistant she ups her Parisian style game. Think Vanessa Bruno velvet bomber jackets and spriggy floral and polka dot shirts (very Soeur Paris) worn with straight-leg jeans and block-heeled ankle boots. For after-work parties she does short LBBs and bare legs.

Catherine Barneville

The glamorous wife of untrustworthy agent, Matthias, Catherine (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) is in her fifties with a yoga-honed body and a nice line in vintage kimonos and antique earrings. She wears Louboutin boots to the hairdressers and you just know her lingerie collection is all devastating La Perla.

© © Christophe Brachet

Noémie Leclerc
6/7

Noémie Leclerc

Laure Calamy’s voluptuous brunette assistant has a pounding desire for her boss, Matthias. She’s overtly feminine in low-cut print dresses – we’ve spotted at least one from & Other Stories – wide leather belts to emphasise her waist, and mid-heeled pumps. She likes vivid colour because she’s that kind of girl.

© © Christophe Brachet

Arlette Azémar
7/7

Arlette Azémar

Liliane Rovère’s Arlette is a veteran agent and actress and works a version of classic Chanel with artistic Left Bank flair – boucle cardigans, sparkly knits, long skirts and wide trousers with flat shoes, accessorized with silk flowers, ginormous costume earrings and layers of long necklaces. Because in Paris, as in life, one is never too old for glamour.

© © Christophe Brachet

Source: Why Call My Agent Is Your New TV Fashion Fix | British Vogue

Call My Agent: the French comedy gem A-listers are desperate to star in

The sharp, hilarious look at the hell of being an agent already features everyone from Juliette Binoche to Isabelle Huppert sending themselves up. Now, Hollywood has come knocking

The pilot opens with an unannounced arrival (of ingénue Camille, aggro agent Mathias’s hidden daughter) and an untimely death (of founder Samuel Kerr, who swallows a wasp while on holiday in Brazil). Mathias and his colleagues, Andréa, Gabriel and Arlette, are thrown into a frenetic power struggle both among themselves and in the wider film industry. Stars threaten to leave ASK, Kerr’s widow and heir threatens to shut up shop, and private passions, usually held at bay, threaten to derail everything.

If the show’s premise is somewhat predictable, its handling of fame is altogether less so. Each episode features a titular guest star – BéatriceDalle, Cécile de France, Guy Marchand – but rather than being written as the focal point, the big name is instead that day’s worry to assuage, the problem to be fixed. Call My Agent does that rare thing that interviews often fail to achieve, and makes these people, who live decidedly abnormal lives, very normal.

There are administratively challenged actors who need help answering emails and vetting nannies, and matrimonially challenged stars who want help finding a date. There’s the actor who can’t drive, the actor who can’t swim and the actor who suddenly can’t act. There’s one who, as Andrea puts it, is “doing a Day Lewis”, and can’t stop acting, unable to come out of a very intense Revenant-style survival role. He ends up being dropped from his subsequent gig as a clean-shaven banker when he literally attacks the producer’s dog, with his teeth.

However, instead of ramping up the self-deprecation implicit in these big-screen stereotypes as Extras did, or as you can imagine a W1A-style British remake might, the talent here is treated with tenderness, and not a small amount of poetry. And by ‘talent’ I mean not just the people (actors and directors) but the artform itself: the show is an ode to cinema. It is French, after all.

Continue reading “Call My Agent: the French comedy gem A-listers are desperate to star in” →