The actress and director Isabelle Mergault died on March 20, 2026, her family revealed in a press release. The late actress was 67 years old. Here’s everything you need to know about her.
Farewell Isabelle Mergault… The late actress and director (Hands of gold, I find you very beautiful…) died at age 67. She started her film career at the end of the 70s appearing in the film The Evasion. Subsequently becoming a theater star, she also entertained RTL listeners for years as a member of the Big Headswith his great friend Laurent Ruquier.
The latest news on Isabelle Mergault
What did Isabelle Mergault die of?
In a press release released on March 20, those close to the actress and resident of the Big Heads from RTL said: “Her family and friends are sad to announce that the director, actress and comedian Isabelle Mergault died this morning, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, from cancer against which she had been courageously fighting for several months..”
The site of Paris Match reveals a little more, revealing that Isabelle Mergault “had been hospitalized for several weeks at the Ambroise-Paré hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine.“The actress is precisely dead”as a result of lung cancer metastasizing to the liver” And “everything happened very quickly“.
Isabelle Mergault mother: she adopted Maya
The late actress became the adoptive mother of a little girl named Maya. “She is as beautiful as a heart, she is strong as a little chick and weak as a rock. She’s a mix of everything“, she said to Catherine Ceylac in Tea or Coffee in 2017. Isabelle Mergault adopted this little girl of Nigerian origin in 2010 in a complicated family context. “I started babysitting and then little by little we said okay, as she is with me almost all the time and the mother is really in difficulty, I said: listen, it would be better if she had my name. It’s easier for procedures and everything“, she said on the microphone of Europe 1 in 2014.
My daughter is too serious. We are at the hotel and instead of going to the mini bar or understanding the TV control, she reads the hotel instructions!! pic.twitter.com/1FYJiYlKSx
— Isabelle Mergault (@IsaMergault) July 15, 2020
Where did Isabelle Mergault live?
In the magazine SHEthe actress once declared that she lived in a house in Pantin. She had inherited it from her parents who were both in the medical field. The father was a surgeon and the mother a doctor. She had completely redone the house to her taste: “I broke everything in this house. Now she’s so beautiful. I have a gym with the most beautiful weight bench in the world. I have a sauna, that’s luxury. I have a very beautiful grand piano, full of cigarette burns. I have armchairs covered in red silk, boudoir style…”
What job did she want to do before acting?
Isabelle Mergault shone as an actress, but she didn’t always want to pursue this profession! One day, while trying to correct her pronunciation fault, something clicked. “When I wanted to be an architect, I went to see a speech therapist who told me: ‘in two sessions, it can go away. But do you really want to be an architect? Keep up the comedy, it can help you make people laugh. I was spotted and it was gone“, she remembered in We are not in bed.
And add to Interviewabout his famous “hiss” : “Today, I wouldn’t part with it for anything in the world! And if I no longer had it, like that, from one day to the next, that would give too much fodder to all the sharks that lurk around me !”
Why was Isabelle Mergault absent from the César despite her victory? “I regret…”
Isabelle Mergault won the César for best first film in 2007 with her feature film I find you very beautiful. But at the time, the actress did not attend the ceremony. It was the film’s actor, Michel Blanc, who took the stage for the acceptance speech in his place and declared: “Isabelle allowed me to tell you why she is not here this evening, she is very sad. It turns out that she had a small operation on her jaw for a tooth, completely innocuous, and that tonight she looks like an elephant woman“.
But years later, Laurent Ruquier’s friend revealed on RTL that it was a false excuse and that she had simply refused to attend the ceremony. “I deflated, I said to myself ‘if I win the Caesar, I’m going to cry, I’m going to stammer, I’m going to be ridiculous’… and I didn’t want to cry “, she explained. And added, on the set ofWe are not in bed : “I regret. Because it was ultimately an excess of pretension not to follow the codes. I don’t know, I didn’t want to play the game. (…) It’s a youthful mistake, even if I wasn’t very young.”
Which famous man was almost the husband of Isabelle Mergault?
Isabelle Mergault was a long-time friend of Laurent Ruquier. Despite his homosexuality, the RTL host made a marriage proposal to her which she accepted. She told this somewhat crazy story in Gala : “One evening when we had both just been dumped and where we were mixing our despairs, Laurent asked me to marry him and I accepted.“. The next day, the two came to their senses and decided not to put the ring on each other’s fingers.
Isabelle Mergault and old age: what she said about it
Growing old did not scare Isabelle Mergault. She spoke about it freely and lucidly at the microphone of Europe 1 in 2017: “Youth is not a virtue and old age is not a defect. We all go through it, we have to accept it“. She even dared a touch of humor of which only she had the secret. She said that, when she was younger, she had had relationships with men much older than her. “There, I couldn’t, or I would have to prepare purees“, she said jokingly.
Isabelle Mergault and her married life: a famous actor and that’s all?
If she was talkative about relationships with men in general, she was much less talkative about the men in her life. Thierry Ardisson, in Everyone is talking about it, had once implied that she was not the faithful type and that she had multiplied conquests… She admitted to having had an ongoing relationship with the actor of Camping, Antoine Duléry. According to the latter, this romance took place when they were very young and he did not blame her that she had cheated on him.
Isabelle Mergault obsessed with her physical appearance
If there was one subject that didn’t amuse him, it was his weight. She spoke about the kilos gained when she stopped smoking in 2017. She had gained 6 kilos in 6 months and she didn’t like this new body at all. “I am obese. I can’t stay like this. I don’t fit into anything. I’m still jogging (…) But I have fewer wrinkles!“, she said in The Big Heads. Previously, she had embarked on a fasting cure in Germany with Laurent Ruquier.
