The daughter of the Gendarme of Saint-Tropez is dead
Geneviève Grad was 80 years old.
She had been a very familiar face in French cinema for six decades. Geneviève Grad played the daughter of Louis de Funès at the cinema in three films of the saga of Constable. She died this Thursday at the age of 80, at the Blois polyclinic, following cancer.
We will remember her as Nicole Crucot, the very pretty daughter of the head marshal Ludovic Cruchot, who made the heads of the boys of Saint-Tropez turn, in the hearts of the yéyés. Geneviève Gradaged 20, also sang the film’s anthem herself The Gendarme of Saint-Tropez (1964), entitled Douliou-douliou Saint-Tropez (also known as Do you do you Saint-Tropez), composed by Raymond Lefebvre and Paul Mauria and written by Marseille lyricist André Pascal.
Embodying the youth of the time and their desire to free themselves from the shackles of the previous generation, Geneviève Grad will return a year later in The Constable in New York (1965). Here again, she will give voice and perform the title “The boys are nice” during the film.
Geneviève Grad will make a third film in the shoes of Nicole Cruchot, on the occasion of Gendarme gets marriedin 1968. But tired by the job, she left the saga immediately. She who had been spotted at the age of 15 to appear in The Dredgers by Jean-Pierre Mocky, before playing in One evening on the beach by Michel Boisrond, quickly left the profession of actress, settling for a few secondary roles on TV and in the cinema in the 1970s.
During the same period, she met Igor Bogdanoff, whose wife she became and with whom she had a child.