Georges Werler

Georges Werler, born Georges Wojazer, was a French actor, theatre director, and teacher whose career stretched from the early 1960s into the 2010s. He preferred the wings to the spotlight. Colleagues remembered a reserved craftsman who listened hard, joked softly, and defended the practical memory of French stage work through the Syndicat National des metteurs et metteuses en scène, the SACD, and the Association de la Régie Théâtrale.

He began as a performer. In the early 1960s he founded the poetry group Les Poémiens, which won a Grand Prix of the Académie Charles-Cros in 1965, and he frequented Jean-Pierre Rosnay's Club des Poètes. As an actor he worked under Roger Planchon, Georges Vitaly, Hubert Gignoux, Guy Rétoré, and Jean-Pierre Miquel, appearing in Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ibsen, among others. Film and television credits included Dominique Goult's Haine (1980) and series such as Les Cinq Dernières Minutes, Julien Fontanes, magistrat, and Pause café.

Directing became his lasting vocation. His first major staging was Victor Hugo's Marie Tudor in 1970 at the Théâtre de l'Est parisien, where he spent about eight years beside Guy Rétoré. He returned often to the classical repertoire, including Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Molière's L'Avare and Le Malade imaginaire, while making contemporary writers a priority. He staged Milan Kundera, Jean-Paul Sartre, Slawomir Mrozek, Gilles Segal, Lanie Robertson, Peter Turrini, François Billetdoux, and Ronald Harwood across Paris houses from the Mathurins and Poche Montparnasse to Hébertot, the Porte-Saint-Martin, and the Comédie des Champs-Élysées.

Two partnerships defined his public reputation. With playwright-actor Gilles Segal he created Monsieur Schpill et Monsieur Tippeton, which took the 1996 Molière for publicly funded theatre, and En ce temps-là, l'amour.... With Michel Bouquet, a Conservatoire colleague and close friend, he directed Le roi se meurt, À tort et à raison, L'Avare, and Le Malade imaginaire. Their Ionesco production became a late-career landmark for Bouquet and later received a Molière for private theatre (listed for 2025 on French Wikipedia). Werler also recorded Bouquet's Conservatoire classes, material later issued by Frémeaux & Associés as a lasting teaching archive.

Teaching mattered as much as premieres. He spent about ten years as a professor at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique and about fourteen at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, and he taught at the École Claude Mathieu. Students and peers described a luminous, attentive presence rather than a self-promoting auteur. THEATREonline credits and Les Archives du spectacle list dozens of stagings that map a quiet through-line of Parisian craft from the TEP years to Alma Mahler, éternelle amoureuse in 2017.

Werler died in early November 2026. French Wikipedia and the Coups d'Œil tribute date the death to 4 November; Les Archives du spectacle lists 3 November, and a same-week X notice said he died on Tuesday aged 88. Actor Pierre Forest announced the loss on social media, calling him a keeper of theatre history who spoke through his choice of plays. Funeral rites were set for 16 November 2026 at the Coupole of the Père-Lachaise funeral home. Cause of death was not made public. He left a discreet but dense mark on postwar Paris theatre: poetry records, dozens of stagings, conservatory generations, and the late Bouquet triumphs that still circulate in rehearsal rooms and on video.