Author removes Schoenaerts biography from shops

Stan Lauryssens, whose book about the late Belgian actor Julien Schoenaerts incited a court action by Julien’s son, Matthias Schoenaerts, has withdrawn the book from sale rather than comply with an interim judgement handed down yesterday. 

The judgement required a quote from Matthias that appears on the cover of the book to be covered up with a sticker with the message that the book contains inaccuracies. Lauryssens said that he and the publisher, Manteau, would rather see the book pulled from shops “than say that it contains inaccuracies that I consciously included. I did not do that”.

The biography Schoenaerts focuses on the period between 1970 and 1974 when Julien, a legend of the Flemish and Dutch stage, cinema and television, suffered a breakdown caused by bipolar disorder.

Lauryssens was careful from the start, he said, to stress that the book is not a conventional biography of the actor, but more of a memoir of his own experiences at that time when he was a reporter covering many of the incidents related.

“There’s absolutely no fiction in the book at all, although dialogues between Julien Schoenaerts and other actors or with his psychiatrist are necessarily imagined,” Lauryssens told Flanders Today when the book went on sale in August. “I went to see everyone who knew him, and they told me what happened.”

Matthias, also a famous actor, and his mother, Dominique Wiche, took Lauryssens to court for damages and with the request that the sticker be placed on the cover. The judge ruled in their favour on the sticker; the damages case is on going. The two plaintiffs argued they did not want to censor the book but essentially wanted to make public their opposition to what Schoenaerts junior called “grave-robbing”. 

Lauryssens describes yesterday’s judgement as “a dangerous precedent” that made it “impossible to write non-fiction or biography in the future. As a writer, you’re never 100% informed. The period covered by the book dates from 40 years ago. Memory is fallible.”

If Matthias and Wiche are awarded damages, they have promised to donate the money to charity.

photo: Detail from the cover of the biography Schoenaerts