Barbara Samson

Last updated

Barbara Samson (born February 7, 1975) is a French poet who was infected with HIV at the age of seventeen. Her story was made into the French television film Being Seventeen .

Samson sought treatment for an eating disorder at the age of seventeen. While staying in a French health clinic, she fell in love with another patient who wrote love poems for her. She later discovered that the poems were translations of Jim Morrison's lyrics of The Doors' rock songs. Her lover had also concealed his HIV-positive status, which Samson in turn contracted. She told nobody about her illness, because she was so ashamed. Barbara met Eric and in 1994 they opened together the "sidaction", a programme which was on almost every French television channel. She also toured numerous schools to speak about AIDS.

Samson wrote an autobiography, On n'est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans ("Nobody Is Serious When They're Seventeen"). [1] The book became a bestseller in France and was translated into eight languages.

As of 2005, Barbara Samson lives and works in France. She visited Ohio University in the spring of 2003 to speak about living with HIV.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thérèse of Lisieux</span> French Discalced Carmelite nun and saint (1873–1897)

Therese of Lisieux, religious name Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, was a French Discalced Carmelite who is widely venerated in modern times. She is popularly known in English as the Little Flower of Jesus, or simply the Little Flower, and in French as la petite Thérèse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">François Cheng</span> French sinologist (born 1929)

François Cheng is a Chinese-born French academician, writer, poet, and calligrapher. He is the author of essays, novels, collections of poetry and books on art written in the French language, and the translator of some of the great French poets into Chinese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsa Triolet</span> Russian-French writer and translator

Ella Yuryevna Kagan, known as Elsa Triolet, was a Russian-French writer and translator.

<i>La Douleur</i>

La Douleur is a collection of six texts by Marguerite Duras published in 1985. Two texts are invented: L'ortie brisée and Aurélia Paris. The remaining four texts are based on lived experience. In La Douleur, her husband becomes Robert L. and others also retain the names used as resistants. Monsieur X. dit ici Pierre Rabier, recounts her association with the man who arrested her husband. In Albert des Capitales and Ter le milicien, Duras becomes Thérèse and these are accounts of the immediate aftermath of Paris being liberated, where those who sold the Jews to the Gestapo, and those who served in the Vichy militia were tried by resistance groups. In Albert des Capitales, Thérèse (Duras) extorts a confession under torture of man who sold Jews to the Gestapo. Her colleagues show their disapproval and rather than the expected summary execution, she asks D. to let him walk away.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anny Duperey</span> French actress, photographer and author

Anny Duperey is a French actress, published photographer and best-selling author with a career spanning almost six decades as of 2021 and more than eighty cinema or television credits, around thirty theatre productions and 15 books. She is a five-time Molière Award for Best Actress nominee, was awarded two 7 d'Or and was nominated for the César Award for Best Supporting Actress for Yves Robert's Pardon Mon Affaire (1976). In 1977, she received the Prix Alice-Louis-Barthou awarded by the Académie Française. She is more commercially known for her leading role as Catherine Beaumont in the TF1 hit series Une famille formidable which ran for 15 seasons (1992-2018) regularly topping national primetime viewership numbers and also broadcast throughout French-speaking Europe peaking at 11 million viewers in France alone. Some of her most notable feature films include Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967); Roger Vadim's Spirits of the Dead (1968); André Hunebelle's The Return of Monte Cristo (1968); Alain Resnais' Stavisky (1974); Umberto Lenzi's From Hell to Victory (1979); Henri Verneuil's A Thousand Billion Dollars (1982), Claude Berri's Germinal (1993) or Alain Resnais' You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012). Her trapeze number for the Gala de l'Union des artistes with Francis Perrin as well as her 'red dress scene' with Jean Rochefort swaying her hips as a nod to Marilyn Monroe on Vladimir Cosma's original score both became cult in French popular culture. She was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur as part of the French Republic's 2012 New Year decoration class also honouring Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Maurice Herzog and Salma Hayek. She has been a supporter of the charity SOS Children's Villages since 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marie Denise Pelletier</span> Musical artist

Marie Denise Pelletier is a francophone Canadian singer. She served as President of Artisti, a copyright collective for music artists operated by Quebec's l'Union des artistes (UDA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hélène Ségara</span> French singer (born 1971)

Hélène Ségara, born Hélène Aurore Alice Rizzo on 26 February 1971, is a French singer of Armenian and Italian descent, who came to prominence playing the role of Esmeralda in the French musical Notre Dame de Paris. She has sold over 10 million records.

Anne-Marie Miéville is a Swiss video and filmmaker whom Sight & Sound has called a "hugely important multimedia artist."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc</span> Feral child (d 1775)

Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc was a famous feral child of the 18th century in France who was known as The Wild Girl of Champagne, The Maid of Châlons, or The Wild Child of Songy.

Officine Meccaniche is a recording studio located in Milan, Italy. It was owned by Carlo e Umberto Zanibelli e Lidia Gualtieri from 1962 until 1998. Since then, it has been owned by Mauro Pagani, a long time violinist of Premiata Forneria Marconi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nadine de Rothschild</span> French writer and actor

Nadine de Rothschild is a French author and former actress. She is the widow of banker Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild family.

Yanette Delétang-Tardif was a French poet, translator into French of Spanish and German works, painter and illustrator. She was a very productive and reputed author of poetry, however she appeared sometimes as a restricted poet.

<i>Les Fleurs du mal (suite et fin)</i> 2008 studio album by Léo Ferré

Les Fleurs du mal (suite et fin) (English: "The Flowers of Evil (last and final)") is an album by Léo Ferré, posthumously released in 2008 by La Mémoire et la Mer. It is his third musical effort dedicated to Charles Baudelaire's poetry, after the seminal Les Fleurs du mal in 1957 and the expanding double LP Léo Ferré chante Baudelaire in 1967.

Bernard Fixot is a French publisher, publishing house founder, and chairman of XO Éditions and Bernard Fixot LLC. Prior to XO Éditions, Fixot spent the majority of his publishing career in a variety of roles with Hachette, where he started working at age 17.

<i>Being 17</i> 2016 film

Being 17 is a 2016 French drama film directed by André Téchiné and starring Kacey Mottet Klein, Corentin Fila and Sandrine Kiberlain. The script was written by Téchiné in collaboration with Céline Sciamma. The plot follows the romantic and sexual awakening of two seventeen-year-old boys as their initial animosity, expressed in violence, morphs into love. Being 17 borrows its title from the second half-line of the first verse of Roman, (1870) by Arthur Rimbaud: On n'est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcelle Maurette</span> French screenwriter, writer and playwright

Marcelle Maurette was a French playwright and screenwriter who is particularly well known for her play Anastasia (1952) which brought her international recognition, and inspired a film of the same name. It is not her only play centred on a woman with a tragic story. Many other works of hers feature historical or fictional heroines with dramatic lives. She was honoured with various awards and was a prominent French literary figure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lys Gauty</span> French cabaret singer and actress

Lys Gauty was a French cabaret singer and actress. Her most significant work came in the 1930s and 1940s as Gauty appeared in film, and recorded her best-known song, "Le Chaland qui passe", which is an interpretation of an Italian composition.

Micheline Luccioni (1930–1992) was a French stage, film and television actress. Her son, José Luccioni, is also an actor.

Brigitte Smadja was a Tunisian-born French author.

References

  1. Samson, Barbara; Cuny, Marie-Thérèse (1994). On n'est pas sérieux quand on a dix sept ans (in French). Fixot. ISBN   978-2-87645-246-6.

Bibliography