Without Michèle Laroque, Olivier Marchal might have remained a police officer… It is indeed thanks to his idyll with the actress, dating back to the 1980s, that he finally embarked on a career as an actor.
His film career, Olivier Marchal owes it in part to his girlfriend at the time: a certain Michèle Laroque! The romance of these two actors dates back to the 1980s. He was still a policeman and she was making her theater debut. It was by following the wise advice of his companion that Olivier Marchal finally embarked on a career as an actor, as he had told during his appearance on the show Je t’aime etc on France 2, in 2020.
“I met her, I was a cop in the anti-terrorist section, and we went out a lot in nightclubs with my group. And I had met an architect from Nice who was having a party at his house, and since she is from Nice, she was at the party, he remembered. But she was starting in Paris, she was at the Blancs-Manteaux, she was doing a show called Saving the Baby Women. I wasn’t into the theater at all yet. , we had a little crush.” Olivier Marchal had already tasted the joys of the theater in his youth, during his stay with the Jesuits of the Saint-Joseph-de-Tivoli high school in Bordeaux. But this pastry chef’s son had never dared to dream of making a career out of it: “I couldn’t see myself saying to my father: ‘I’m going to Paris’. It was a bit…
Michèle Laroque finally managed to convince him to change direction. “He said to me, ‘If you want to be an actor, you have to try.’ She was the one who let me try my audition.” While continuing his work as a PJ inspector, Olivier Marchal then took acting lessons at the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. He landed his first role in 1988 and began on familiar ground, since he played an inspector in Don’t Wake A Sleeping Cop. In 1994, he finally left the police.
On the heart side, separated from Michèle Laroque, Olivier Marchal finds love again with Catherine Quiniou, with whom he married in 1995. The couple have four children: Léa (in 1994), Zoé (in 1998), Ninon (in in 2006) and Basil (in 2009). For her part, Michèle Laroque was married for the first time to director Dominique Deschamps, father of a daughter Oriane (born in 1995).Since 2008, he has shared the life of Senator Marie François Baroin.
