“Murders in Nancy”: Cristiana Reali, a life of series

She didn’t start acting out of passion, but to learn French! Cristiana Reali, now in her fifties, was born in Brazil, in São Paulo, and arrived in France at the age of 12. Her parents fled the military dictatorship and her journalist father was transferred to Paris. To improve his diction and erase his accent, his mother enrolled him in theater lessons. Far from being a chore, it reveals a passion in her that will make her abandon her law studies for the famous Cours Florent.

There, she learns from a master who subjugates her. And the fascination is mutual. The actor, single in front of the eternal, makes her play the classical repertoire and literally falls under the spell of this magnificent brunette with ocean eyes. “She represented all the women I had loved, actually. It was the finish line of my life,” Francis Huster always confides to him.

Thanks to him, she left the boards for the small screen, and thus became a subscriber to summer sagas like sentimental TV movies, and later fictions that count. The older ones remember the couple in “Terre indigo”, on TF1. In thirty-two years, the Brazilian has shot in fifty-two films and series, including “Clash”, “Les Bracelets rouges”, “Clem”.

Shunned by the cinema

RTBF offers today to discover it in the thriller genre with this new episode of the “Meurtres à…” collection. This time we’re going to Nancy, the Mecca of Art Nouveau. She plays a policewoman in full investigation against a background of Satanism and witchcraft. As usual, the scenario is based on local legend and historical facts. Audience success assured.

Despite this brilliant career for TV, Cristiana Reali seems shunned by the cinema, which has still not given her a major role. But it is in the theater that the actress flourishes. She is one of the pieces that make the news in Paris, so wide is her palette.

This frenzy of activity has, it seems, got the better of her seventeen-year-long marriage to Francis Huster, with whom she has two daughters as sublime as her, Elisa and Toscane. When you do the same job, obviously you understand each other better, but competition and concessions also come into play… Francis Huster opened up in the media about the pain of this separation, which he makes his mea culpa: “I I missed sacrifices of love. We should never have separated with Cristiana. It’s my fault. Totally. It’s because I’m completely crazy. I am unlivable. »

His ex-wife did not hold it against him. These two have remained on good terms. “Francis often comes for lunch or dinner. The girls really like our reports. They have friends who say: It’s weird that they get along so well when they are separated… I will always love Francis and he will always be part of my life. For the children on the one hand, but also because he’s a good person, with all his madness, his original side which can be destabilizing when you don’t know him. He’s a good, generous, sensitive guy, ”does not budge the actress, of whom we do not know the one who makes her heart beat today.

“Murders in Nancy”, October 11, 8:25 p.m., front page.