Who is yasmina reza

Share this page:. The Rise of Will Smith. Around The Web Provided by Taboola. Create a list ». The 63th Annual Tony Awards Premiere. Iranian in Hollywood. See all related lists ». Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDb page. Find out more at IMDbPro ». How Much Have You Seen? How much of Yasmina Reza's work have you seen? See more awards ». Known For. Carnage Writer. Chicas Writer. Show all Hide all Show by Hide Show Writer 14 credits. Hide Show Actress 5 credits.

Hide Show Director 1 credit. Hide Show Thanks 1 credit. Hide Show Self 11 credits. I don't know if I am or not. Perhaps…" She lets the thought hang, taking another sip of her tea. In fact, she positively eschews the notion that she sets out to write plays with "big ideas". For me, I'm thrilled they say that, but it's not that that animates me. What motivates me most is writing about people who are well brought up and yet, underneath that veneer, they break down.

Their nerves break down. It's when you hold yourself well until you just can't any more, until your instinct takes over. It's physiological.

It is for this reason, she says, that she never seeks to explain or deconstruct her characters' backgrounds for the audience. I work like a painter. If a painter is doing a portrait of someone, he's not interested in their childhood; he paints what he sees.

There's no explanation because it doesn't mean anything. The majority of her work, she explains, starts not with the desire to tackle an overarching social theme but with a single spark — such as the incident with her son's friend — that illuminates something bigger. This has led to criticism that her plays are banal and middle of the road; that they're dependent on the interpretation of great actors for their success.

But it has also brought her immense popularity; there is, among a handful of critics, the somewhat snobbish belief that her plays are for people who don't normally like going to the theatre.

Partly, Reza attributes her no-nonsense attitude to having initially trained as an actress. She studied at the renowned Jacques Lecoq school in Paris before turning professional for several years. She wrote her first play, Conversations After a Burial , in in her late 20s "because I was always writing anyway. I knew I was good at it" and has since written seven plays, five novels and one work of non-fiction.

Her experience on stage, she says, "informed my work enormously". Her American translator, David Ives, has said in the past: "Half the reason her plays get done is because actors want to do them… there's a crackling surface there for a performer.

She consciously makes things easy for the crew also. Her plays are all set within a single set, contain no more than four people and never include suggestions for a character's appearance or biography. Writing is a lot more organic than that. It's not at all intellectual. By now, she is talking in a rapid stream of French and her bobbed hair — which I'm realising is a helpful barometer of her internal mood — is getting increasingly animated, springing up this way and that, so that Reza has to brush it out of her face.

She stops herself, then laughs at her own intensity. It is a curious thing, this laughter of hers because, according to almost every interview with Reza I have ever read, she is meant to be po-faced and pretentious, a woman quick to take offence, who is snippy and defensive in her responses. And yet the petite woman sitting in front of me is all smiles, lightness and enthusiastic hand gestures. She seems to be the very opposite of theatrical pretension.

When I describe her plays as accessible, she seizes on this and agrees. I love this definition. I am OK with that.

Complex ideas but made accessible. There's no point in writing theatre if it isn't accessible, because no one will see it. The quote about laughter being dangerous was, she says, taken out of context. And it seems self-evident that anyone who makes a character throw up on stage over a priceless Kokoschka catalogue in the middle of a supposedly civilised discussion between adults as Annette does in God of Carnage must have a sense of humour.

In God of Carnage , I put it literally: she vomits on a pile of art books. At no point does she scowl like the grande dame she is meant to be. She only allows me to pay the drinks bill after checking I will be reimbursed. When I comment on her watch, she takes it off to show it to me. She chats easily about her two children with film director Didier Martiny — a year-old daughter, Alta, who is a criminal lawyer, and her son, Nathan, 19, who wants to be a singer.

She could not be more charming. Perhaps age has mellowed her. Perhaps it is that we are doing the interview in French so she feels more comfortable expressing herself. Perhaps she's just having a good day. Whatever the reason, there is no sign of the spiky harridan I had been expecting. How, I wonder, has this idea of Reza gained credence?

There was one article written that said something like, 'I hated her before; I hate her even more now I've met her. As a woman operating in the male-dominated world of theatre, she has never encountered obvious sexism but "in the first interviews I did, I was young.

I didn't know any better and I used to take out my lipstick and put it on and I think that wasn't good at all. It was seen as too feminine… perhaps they didn't take me seriously". Her success, too, one imagines, must stick in the craw of those who believe their writers should be penniless artists living in romantic garrets, grateful for any small sliver of attention they receive. I don't consider myself a celebrity or an intellectual.

I'm a writer and that's not the same… I don't want to have an opinion on current affairs, on politics and, in a way, that's bad for me because if you take the position of an intellectual, it gives you authority.

But — too bad — I don't want to do it. I have pretension enough to think that writing should have its own authority. She says she is wary of becoming "a spokesman" for her characters. I don't like to do that because I want to be able to write characters who have different takes on life and for them to be convincing.

Her avowedly apolitical stance makes it all the more bizarre that, in , Reza chose to shadow the then French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy for a year leading up to his election in May The book she wrote about this experience — L'aube, le soir ou la nuit Dawn, Dusk or Night — described Sarkozy as a pint-sized egoist driven by "a childlike search for approbation".

In one chapter, Reza describes the future president grabbing a copy of Le Figaro "visibly gripped" by an item on the front page. It was not the news story about Iran or the French election that had captured his attention, but an advertisement for a luxury watch.

What does Reza make of his time in office? It was an observation of a man, a movement… I can have an opinion about the way he runs the country but it is no more interesting than that of anyone else, of a normal citizen. Unsurprisingly, given that her observations pulled no punches, she is no longer in contact with the president. When the book was done, it was evident to me we could never see each other again.