She had revealed her HIV status in 2005 with her autobiography “Love in the blood”, a big bookstore success (180,000 sales) then adapted into a TV movie. Her triple therapy had exhausted her heart and she had resorted to a transplant in 2003, which made her the first HIV-positive heart transplant recipient in France.
In 2008, she suffered a heart attack, her heart stopping beating for 22 seconds. And recently, she had announced on social networks that her second heart was coming to an end and that she needed a new transplant. “Waiting for my 3rd,” she wrote on Instagram on June 8.
“On June 14, Charlotte had to have emergency surgery to replace her second-hand heart as she called it, but this new transplant did not take, this third heart did not live,” explained her daughter, his sister and his father in a statement sent to AFP.
Associations helping AIDS patients tweeted tribute messages, like Aides: “We learn with emotion of the death of Charlotte Valandrey, who has many times contributed alongside us to fight against HIV and discrimination suffered by the people who live with it”.
Charlotte Valandrey has “been a great and tireless witness to life with HIV and has thus made it possible to advance the fight against stigmatization”, wrote Sidaction on its networks.
Charlotte Valandrey is not yet 17 when “Rouge Baiser” comes out, the film that made her the new star. She embodies, in France during the Cold War, Nadia, a young rebel who militates in the Young Communists and sees her ideal waver after a romantic encounter (Lambert Wilson). He was then predicted a destiny à la Sophie Marceau.
It was a few days before she turned 18 that she learned that she had contracted HIV. With a “gothic prince”, member of a famous rock band, she will only say.
She is not selected for “White Wedding” (1989), after having shared the secret of her illness with the director. His filmography is then far from the glory that he was promised. His career will be mainly on television, playing from 1991 to 2000 in the series “Les Cordier, judge et cop” (up to 11.4 million viewers) or in “Tomorrow belongs to us” (2017-2019).
The TF1 group, broadcaster of these series, expressed its “deep sadness”.
Charlotte Valandrey must be “buried in privacy in Pléneuf-Val André”, a Breton town where she spent vacations during her childhood and which inspired her artist name, her relatives announced.
A religious ceremony will take place in September in Paris.
