François Darbon

friendship was born through discussions about theatre, and at a time when André Clavé had temporarily set aside the troupe he had founded in 1936, the company Les Comédiens de la Roulotte, with Geneviève Wronecki-Kellershohn, Jean Desailly—then a very young amateur beginner—and a few others. François Darbon would meet them again in September 1940 to perform La paix chez soi. The following month, the troupe joined the Jeune France movement, and they finally began a life as professional actors.

They were joined in February 1941 by Jean Vilar, who agreed to come to La Roulotte “simply as a writer,” and by Hélène Gerber, both students of Charles Dullin. Thanks to financial support from Jeune France, the troupe went on a theatrical tour through central France during the summer of 1941. In the summer of 1942, La Roulotte set off again, touring Brittany and central France, but this time without subsidies, as Jeune France had been dissolved at the end of winter. For security reasons, Clavé was then forced to leave his own company a year after joining a Resistance network, the Brutus network.

François Darbon used the final years of the war to study under Charles Dullin. After the war, he reunited with André Clavé. Having returned from the Nazi camps of Buchenwald and Dora, Clavé was asked in 1946 by Jeanne Laurent to reconstitute his troupe, Les Comédiens de la Roulotte, to conduct exploratory tours. She later asked him to replace Roland Piétri as director of the Centre Dramatique de l’Est in Colmar. Darbon took part in all these ventures until the end of December 1952, when Michel Saint-Denis replaced Clavé. Darbon and Clavé then founded the Clavé-Darbon Company together and performed in France and Germany until 1955, when André Clavé was forced to leave the theatre to pursue other paths.

François Darbon then followed a more solitary path, working from production to production and film to film. He would nonetheless cross paths with Clavé again—both men bound by unwavering loyalty—when Clavé asked him to train African radio announcers in diction at the school he directed, the Studio-École (a school created by Pierre Schaeffer in preparation for decolonization). At 25, Darbon married the lovely Nathalie Manoyloff, of Russian origin. They had a daughter, Sophie. Sophie Darbon is an author, actress, and director like her father. She recently published a children’s tale, Sotisette Planplan et la clé des fées, with Edilivre, dedicated to her parents.