Fanfreluche has made hundreds of thousands of young people dream for 15 years, but few know what lies beneath his features.
Kim Yaroshevskaya celebrated her 100th birthday last Sunday. François Legault had the good sense to mark the anniversary with a warm message that she was there. It took years for Barbie, born in 1959, to dethrone Fanfreluche in the hearts of Quebec viewers.
I wrote an entire season of lyrics for Bim (Louis de Santis) and Sol (Marc Favreau), without anyone in high places knowing. I incognito replaced my twin brother who created these two clown characters and spent a year in Europe. Then I was lucky enough that Fernand Doré, head of children’s programming at Radio-Canada, chose me as the lead author of “La Boîte à Surprise.” Unfortunately, the 1958–1959 season ended abruptly due to the famous directors’ strike.
Photo from IMDB
Fanfreluche makes amends
Denise Marsan, the wife of the poet Roland Giguère, developed the concept of the surprise box. My only merit was to increase the number of fan delights, create other characters, extend the show to an hour and bring out Guy Sanche. With him I fleshed out his role as Bobino and his invisible interlocutors in order to make Bobino an independent show. Meanwhile, young Kim Yaroshevskaya was panicking about how important her character was becoming.
Despite Fanfreluche’s enormous fame and her numerous successes on stage, despite more than fifteen films and more than twenty television series, Kim Yaroshevskaya never became a popular star.
One day I met her at the IGA fishmonger’s shop on Île-des-sœurs, where she lived. I asked the fishmongers on duty if they knew who she was. The two men, old enough to have seen Fanfreluche on television, shrugged. They had no idea who he was. When I told them that she was the actress who portrayed Fanfreluche, they were full of excuses. Of course they knew who Fanfreluche was!
A very humble star
As we left the store, Kim kindly told me that I had made her blush by identifying her in this way to fishmongers with whom she regularly did business. “But I’m so happy they remember Fanfreluche,” she added. I had Kim act in several series I wrote, including Le Grand Duc, Banana Skin, Love and Friendship and Ent’Cadieux, but none of the characters she played made it big. Shadow of the Fanfreluche doll.
Kim Yaroshevskaya is a woman who is tough as steel beneath an exterior of fragility. She never forgot the tragic memory of her father, who languished for years in Stalin’s concentration camps. And his mother will die of pain. That’s why, in her grandmother’s house, Kim filled her memories with the stories and tales that nourished the Fanfreluche doll for so many years, giving the happy days of an entire generation.
Kim has just turned a hundred years old, but it’s not a century, but a whole millennium full of memories and stories of which she seems to be the guardian.
