Renowned French thespian Catherine Samie is in Cannes to promote Frederick Wiseman's film version of The Last Letter, a Jewish mother's monologue about her plight in a Ukranian ghetto. The great actress, who toured with the play in France and North America, reflects on the painful themes developed through her role.

Why did you have a vocation to become an actress, a thespian?

In fact, I didn't particularly want to become an actress. It just happened by accident. I didn't quite know what to do with my life, but one day, as I was walking down the street, I saw an audition poster in front of the Rue Blanche Theatre School. So I auditioned in a scene from " The Misanthrope." I was Célimène and played opposite a young actor named Guy Bedos! Evelyne Kerr was one of the young students who entered the Rue Blanche Theatre School along with me. So I was very lucky that I could begin to learn my craft. One of my mentors was Mr Legof. Then I entered the Theatre Conservatory, under Pierre Dux's guidance. I was very lucky to have great masters.

How did you first meet Mr Wiseman ?

I first met him when he was filming his documentary about the Comédie Française. As I had been named Doyenne of the Comédie Française, I happened to be in many places where Mr Wiseman was filming. He spent about 6-7 months filming, but he and his team were always very quiet and unobtrusive, so I never really noticed them. Before returning to the USA, Mr Wiseman struck up a friendship with Jean Pierre Michaël, the administrator of the Comédie Française, and he told him that he would like to direct the play The Last Letter, adapted from Vassili Grossman's seventh chapter of Life and Fate. And he suggested that I should play the part of that woman. I felt both surprised and honoured.

Reading the play and the part was a deeply engrossing experience for me. It's a very important play for the people from all over the world, and though Vassili Grossman wrote the novel in the 1940s, it still has very modern values to it. Outbursts of violence still occur in many countries of the world, in Kosovo, Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, African countries, etc. Many people of the world are still divided by conflicts. So although this play is about the Shoah, it's also about the barbarity that lurks within us all. This play is thus a great work of art that is both timeless and universal.

We first rehearsed the play in the Studio Théâtre de la Comédie Française. We toured in France, in Canada and in the USA, and then Mr Wiseman planned to make a film version of the play [he originally wanted to make the film before the play, in 1993]. I never thought I would be in Cannes with the film, but it seems now like a natural chain of events.

You first said about the rehearsal of your part: 'It was difficult to say the lines. I cried like an animal.'

At first, I just couldn't say the lines. I just felt shattered by what I read, I cried. So first, I had to check my sufferings and feelings in order to better approach and domesticate the lines. But each sentence to be memorized felt like a sting, a pain. Those words are so strong that one gets the feeling that it is impossible to carry on, and the heart feels like bursting. So I needed to learn those lines very slowly, delicately, to let myself into them and put a curb on the violent suffering that was inside of me.

You knew the war yourself as a child…

Yes, I was 8 or 9 years old during WWII, and I saw many Jewish friends go and never come back. I saw painful things, but nothing like the great tragedy of camps and ghettos. This is also why I had to play that part with as much modesty as possible, because I could only imagine what had happened, this tragedy which also struck Vassili Grossman [the author lost his mother to the Nazis]. Fortunately, his book, which had been banned by the KGB, crossed the frontier on a microfilm and was published in France in 1980. And now, Grossman is with us, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and the sky is blue. It's a wonderful day…

How did you first work out the play and the role with Mr Wiseman ?

He helped me greatly. He helped me check the suffering inside of me, and not cry the lines out. He helped me get the feeling that I was really talking to my son, Vitia. He told me to conceive of the audience in front of me as my son. He wanted me to contain myself and not make the part too obtrusive. He helped me to become less and less declamatory.

How would you reflect on your character's final words?

'Live, live, live!' Life. She is going to die, but with every death, there is a new life. And this woman shows us all the facets of living. She's not a faultless mother and wife who's going to die. She talks to her son as she probably never did before. She's deeply human, like all the people around her. She looks at them and sees that they're still petty, that they still commit misdemeanors despite their proximity to death. So she tells her son to carry on living and enjoying life. But actually, in the camps, many mothers who were about to be executed told their sons to survive at all cost, to be able to tell what had had happened to them. And I think that we, all of us, still have to tell what happened, because man will never mend his ways otherwise.

Interview and translation: Robin Gatto