Denise Grey

Édouardine Grey was born in Châtillon in the Aosta Valley of north-west Italy, close to the French border. The town at the time primarily spoke the Valdôtain dialect. She was naturalized as a French citizen on 13 July 1922. She started working in the film industry in 1915 in the silent film En famille, an adaptation of the novel by Hector Malot, before dedicating herself to theatre work. She went back to working in films, now talkies, in the 1930s. She came to fame in the 1940s with films such as Monsieur Hector (1940), Boléro (1942) or Devil in the Flesh (1947). Old age did not end her career. For example, in 1972, she starred in a French television series called Les Rois maudits. Thanks to the film La Boum, in which she plays "Poupette", the great-grandmother of Sophie Marceau, she gained recognition from a new audience growing up in the 1980s. In 1986, she sang Devenir vieux (Becoming…