Michael Lonsdale

I have just posted the first instalment of “Topologie d’une rencontre au lieu de la solitude” in Vita Text – yes, without the e, because it is in English, this first instalment. And I haven’t a clue how to translate the title. Maybe I will come up with a satisfactory English title later. I wrote this text in the eighties for bilingual actor Michael Lonsdale, and it switches into French, so I will probably post the next instalment in Vita texte.
I was very much enamoured with Michael Lonsdale in Paris in the eighties. I first encountered him in esoteric French plays and poetry readings. I plucked up the courage to speak to him at the Théatre du Rond Point when he and Madeleine Renaud were playing in L’amant anglaise de Marguerite Duras. Afterwards, he was sitting in the foyer/cafeteria with Madeleine Renaud and Jean Louis Barraux (who actually touched my bum as I was making for the bar… the only stranger I can remember doing that in a public place…). Anyway I went up to their table and told Michael Lonsdale I thought he was fabulous (maybe not the actual word I used) and that I had recently adored his acting in a play in rue de Lapp, and he said “Ah bon, vous aimez ce genre de theatre ?” I was struck dumb. I had prepared my statement. I wasn’t expecting my idol to speak back to me!
Michael Lonsdale is bilingual and in English he often plays the baddy in big budget films. I adored the chasm between the two personae. I just basically had a crush on him and so I filled a book with an enfevered pseudo-dialogue. One of those beautiful, cloth-backed blank books you could buy in that street with the two beautiful stationer’s shops, round behind the Hôtel de Ville. I believe it was beige, the book I filled for him. I took it with me to a poetry reading at Les Halles. He was reading Walt Whitman, but I am pretty sure he read in French. Forgive me for not remembering a word of what he said, I was so enraptured by the sound of his voice, and afterwards, I thrust the hot object into his hand, told him I admired his work very much and had written this book for him. My name and address were inside the book on a business card that identified me as a "consultant en communciation technique". Did I also write my contact details on the inside cover? Probably not, because at that stage, I felt the book was more his than mine.
I never heard from him. I was very disappointed that he did not even say something anodin like “thank you for having written for me”. I tried to contact him through his agent once, to ask if he could please return the book, but I didn’t get an answer, and then I changed my mind and decided I didn’t want the book back anyway, because I had written it for him, filled it lovingly with words for him, and if he didn’t want it I didn’t really want it either, it would have stared at me from my bookshelves as a reminder that he had rejected my attempt to write at him.