Liliane Rovère

Origins and early life

Liliane Rovère was born Liliane Cyprienne Cukier in the fourth arrondissement of Paris on 30 January 1933, to Polish Jewish immigrants, in a Yiddish-speaking household; she likes to point out that she was born in the same week Hitler became chancellor.

Work and career

Under the German occupation she wore the yellow star, then was hidden with her brother in the south-west of France under an assumed name, in Catholic and largely Dominican institutions. Her parents survived, but most of the family was murdered, and she has spent her later years telling that story to schools and on the record. She was living in the jazz world of Saint-Germain-des-Prés by her twenties and was the companion of the trumpeter Chet Baker, an episode she has never hidden and which fed the part that made her famous.

Discovered for the cinema by Bertrand Blier in 1970, she worked for four decades in film and theatre before French audiences of every age came to know her as Arlette Azémar, the veteran agent with the little dog in the series Dix pour cent, from 2015 to 2020. She published her memoirs, La Folle Vie de Lili, in 2019.