Bourvil was in the terminal phase of Bone Marrow Cancer during his final filming: The Red Circle (one of his best roles) and The Atlantic Wall (1970).
Jean-Pierre Melville has just chosen Bourvil to play the role of a policeman in his next film: Le Cercle rouge. That same day, the two men have lunch at Tong-Yen, a Vietnamese restaurant on Rue de Ponthieu decorated with pastel prints. There, for the first time, Bourvil talks about his illness. Melville reassures him, citing the example of John Wayne: “He has made more than ten films since he was operated on for lung cancer. Diseases, even those with horrible names, can be cured.”
Filming begins in Marseille on January 18, 1970. Bourvil is tired. Nodules begin to appear all over his body. One of them pierces the skin of his skull where it appears as a bump. He meets Pierrette Bruno, the author of Pepsie (a thousand performances at the Théâtre Daunou). She played La Bonne Planque with him for seven years. She is a small, blonde Marseillaise with almond-shaped eyes. She takes him to lunch at La Madrague, where she owns a white house with a terrace by the sea. “But tell me, what’s on your head?” she says to him during the meal. “I got up too suddenly,” says Bourvil, “and I hit my head against a rack. Afraid of the “horrible name” of his illness? Afraid of the insurers? Maybe both.
January 13, 1970, in the small Marseille-Aubagne train station. Bourvil is spinning. He is very agitated. He is swaying. “Stop jumping around like that,” Melville tells him. “You have to be all of a piece.” However, the disease is running its course again. On February 20, he has to return to the Hartman clinic for new cobalt sessions. He doesn’t tell anyone. The nodule piercing the skin of his skull is removed, but other lumps appear on his body, which is rapidly losing weight.
April 1970. Bourvil’s pains become intense. The X-ray sessions are now daily. It is a friend of his son who drives him every evening to a clinic in Boulogne to undergo his treatment. He has lost ten kilos. Inside the flesh, the bones disintegrate in plates as large as five-franc pieces.
August 5, 1970. Bourvil says to his wife: “I’m going to bed so I never get up again.” August 6, 1970. Melville needs him to dub a sentence from Le Cercle rouge. At 5 p.m., he is sitting in the auditorium. Melville barely recognizes him. He is very thin, his right eye is very dilated. “Forgive me for remaining seated,” he says, “I had a terrible attack of renal colic last night.” He speaks in a faint voice. He no longer lies to cling to a hope, but out of discretion. The projection booth goes dark. Bourvil has only one sentence to say: “My director has just told me that only luck could allow me to catch up with Vogel! Luck and me, in truth.” Melville has disappeared before the lights come back on. He does not want to see Bourvil go to his death.
September 22, afternoon. Bourvil is dying. His sons, who look so much like him, are at the foot of his bed. Around midnight, he says: “And yet, I didn’t want to die.” At one o’clock in the morning André Bourvil is dead. “… Even when you know you are very ill, you have to work until the end and go.”
