2001

TRACES CREATE DREAMS

The Life Paths of Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar planned her life's path very early. Her main goal was to perfect herself. In 1980, at the age of seventy-seven, she became the first woman elected to the Académie française. She was at the height of her career. Her companion Grace did not live to see this event; she had died of cancer shortly before.

After her friend's death, Marguerite Yourcenar rediscovers life. Together with Jerry Wilson, 45 years her junior, she does what she always loved most: travel. For Marguerite Yourcenar, self-realisation also means constantly correcting herself. Just as she often reworks her works several times, she also loves to return again and again to the same places. She walks in her own footsteps, not out of inertia, but because this deepening allows her to perfect herself with greater certainty and greater resolve.

After Jerry Wilson's early death, Marguerite Yourcenar is alone again. She writes the last part of her family trilogy and tells of her life with Grace, who had stood by her side for more than forty years, and without whom two unforgettable works of world literature might hardly have come into being: "Memoirs of Hadrian" and "The Abyss".

VOICES	Birgitta Assheuer, Marianne Lochert, Doris Wolters, Klaus Barner, Matthias Haase
MUSIC	Santana, Jacques Loussier, Edith Piaf, Miles Davis
DIRECTOR	Heinz Nesselrath
SOUND ENGINEER	Alfred Habelitz and Christiane Köhler
EDITOR	Gerhard Adler
DURATION	85 minutes
FIRST BROADCAST	15.9.2002 um 18:30 auf SWR 2 - Feature am Sonntag

Photo: Bernhard De Grendel, Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 4.0 – cropped, border added.