Guillaume Gallienne was different from his three athletic brothers – he liked to dance and dress up as a woman. His mother treated him like a girl and told him he was gay. The thing is, he was actually heterosexual

In his early teens, Guillaume Gallienne’s mother told him that he was gay. He had always found it difficult fitting in with his macho father and athletic brothers, and so everyone in the family was convinced that he was gay – including Guillaume himself.

It took him several years to realise that was not strictly true.

Even when he started to go out with girls, his parents insisted that he was in denial and when he announced his engagement to the woman who is now his wife, neither his mother nor his father spoke to him for 24 hours.

Guillaume was born in Paris into a haute-bourgeois family. His mother, Melitta, a descendant of the Russian-Georgian aristocracy, married Jean-Claude, a wealthy businessman. They had four sons, of whom Guillaume was the third. But he was not a boy in the way his brothers were or in the way his tyrannical father wanted him to be.

“I did not correspond to the masculine criteria of my family,” he says. “My father was in the French Olympic bobsleigh team – he liked sailing and horse riding. I was scared of horses and would get seasick.”

Instead, young Guillaume preferred to dance, learn Spanish and dress up like Sisi, the Empress of Austria, who was known as the loveliest woman in Europe, using his mother’s duvet as a crinoline.

“Being a man meant being brutal, but I didn’t feel strong enough. Very early on, I realised that I could not be like the men in my family, but that I also didn’t want to be like them. The only alternative for me was to turn to the women of my family and especially my mother, whom I adored.”

There was only one way for the young Guillaume to justify in his own mind why he was not a “real” boy and at the same time be close to his mother by differentiating himself from his brothers, and that was to believe that he was, in fact, a girl.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch the trailer for Guillaume Gallienne’s film, Me Myself and Mum

When Guillaume’s mother wanted to call him and his brothers to supper, she would call: “Les garçons et Guillaume – à table!” (Boys and Guillaume, to the table!) This sentence later inspired his coming-of-age one-man show and now a film, Me, Myself and Mum. The idea came during a session with his psychiatrist and he decided to write an autobiographical film about a boy who learns to accept his heterosexuality, in a family that had decided he was homosexual.

“It became the connecting link for all the separate anecdotes in the puzzle of my life; as if all the years of confusion suddenly made sense.”

Guillaume stars in the film as his younger self and also as his mother in drag. Now 41 and a well-known French actor and member of the acclaimed Comédie-Française theatre, he seems to be at peace with his troubled childhood. In the film, he manages to revisit it with humour but also a sense of justice, in what he calls a love letter to women, but most of all to his mother.

Did she simply treat him like the daughter she never had? The answer is not clear, even to Guillaume. He says: “I think she did, but subconsciously. When we talk on the phone, she always hangs up saying ‘Kisses, my darling’” (in French, ma cherie, which she uses to speak to her son, is the feminine gender).

The strong, complex personality of his mother, who was very feminine, fascinated him. “She was never tender with us – never hugged or kissed us – and was often blunt and cold, but she could also be warm. She was a fantastic woman, deeply modest and shy, and extremely funny. In her, I could see qualities I preferred.”

She inspired him to the extent that he began to imitate her. His voice ended up resembling hers so much that even his grandmother would sometimes mistake him for her daughter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A family meal in a scene from the film. Guillaume plays his younger self and his mother, in drag, left.

At the age of 10, Guillaume was sent to a Christian Brothers boarding school. For the first time, he found himself feeling different outside the microcosm of his family. “I was very effeminate and precious. My snobbish classmates often bullied me and insulted me, calling me a faggot. I used to spend every day crying.”

To cope with the challenges of school, he had to be inventive. “I had a classmate whose father had died and I noticed people were very nice to him. So when someone asked me one day why I was crying, I said that my father had just died. Of course, my family found out at some point when another classmate’s mother came to dinner at our house and was surprised to see my father was very much alive.”

It is interesting, perhaps, that he decided to “kill” his father. In a symbolic way, he does that in the film, too, as we only see him on few occasions. It seems it is all part of his conscious decision to turn the dark moments of his childhood into a light-hearted comedy and to search for the funny side of the sometimes ugly truth.

The difficulties at school led to a nervous breakdown when Guillaume was 12. He began to see a psychiatrist who recommended to his parents that they send their son away. Guillaume went to a boys’ boarding school in England, near Portsmouth, but this time found himself in an environment where he felt free to be different. He loved the experience.

“I blended in very easily. The fact that we were all wearing uniforms applied some kind of equality, as there was no judgment based on appearance. No one made fun of me there. I could finally be myself.” He even developed a crush on a boy, although he never told him. He told his mother, but she had a surprise in store. “Of course you are in love with a boy,” she said. “It’s because you are gay.”

Until then, everything had been clear in his mind. “I knew I couldn’t be a boy, because I was not strong and brutal. So I had to be a girl and fall in love with a boy, as girls do. When my mum told me the reason I was in love with a man was because I was gay, my whole world fell apart. I had spent my life thinking I was a girl – now I had to learn how to be a boy!”

He does not know if the fact that his father wanted him to be a “real” man, while his mother subconsciously treated him as a girl, was a source of conflict between his parents. “My mother would rarely fight to protect us against her husband. He was tyrannical; it was hard to go against his will.”

His father’s choice not to deal with his son’s troubled childhood also manifested itself years later, when he went to see Guillaume’s one-man show. “He did a wonderful thing – he ‘forgot’ his hearing aid. He kept shouting at my mother’s ear, asking her what was happening on stage, so she was not able to follow it either. I had read the text to her much earlier, though, and she found it very funny. But she prefers the film, which she says is more moving. My father never saw it; he died in 2009.”

In a dysfunctional family, Guillaume has managed to find a silver lining. “My past is not Les Misérables. We grew up in a very lively environment. My parents would take us to operas and plays, and we would travel a lot together.”

Guillaume feels no anger towards his mother. Playing her in the film (a hit in France) allowed him to, literally, occupy her shoes and to feel some empathy for her. “When I was 16, I spoke to her about how I felt. My confusion was also caused by her behaviour towards me. But when I played her in the film and experienced everything through her point of view, I realised it was too easy to blame everything on her.”

He had a few affairs with boys, but didn’t seem to be fulfilled or happy. “My sexual impulses for men were very narcissistic. I hated myself; I was feeling ugly and inadequate. I was so humiliated by the men of my family that if there was a man who treated me differently, I would fall in love with him. It was more of a seduction game. Succeeding meant I was not that undesirable.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unlike his athletic brothers, the teenaged Guillaume loved to dance, a memory played out in the film.

The uncertainty continued until his aunt suggested that the only way to find out if he was gay or straight, was to fall in love. Which he did; with a woman. He met Amandine 14 years ago. It was love at first sight and it changed his life. They have been happily married since 2004 and have a seven-year-old son, Tado.

There is a scene towards the end of the film, where Guillaume, in a “reversed coming out” as he calls it, tells his mother that he is straight and in love with a woman.

The announcement comes to her as a shock and evokes a cruel realisation. All these years, if she was convinced her son was gay, it meant that she would always remain the most important woman in his life. Now that he was confirmed as straight and in love with a woman, she had lost her exclusive relationship with him.

How did his mother cope with that in real life? “It took her many years to come to terms with it. The way she’s been with my girlfriends – and still is with my wife – is very different to how she is with my brothers’ girlfriends. When Amandine and I announced our engagement, my parents didn’t speak to us for 24 hours. Amandine was very sad. I went to my mother and said: ‘It’s very simple. Either you start being polite to my girlfriend or the wedding and the children are going to happen without you. You choose.’

“So she accepted her, but until this day I believe she still doesn’t like the idea of me being with a woman.”

When it comes to labels, he refuses to accept any. “My sexuality today is straight because I fell in love with a woman. If I would fall in love with a man tomorrow, I would have a gay life. Who we happen to be attracted to depends on our heart – it’s not something we can control. I could erase my past and say that I am a straight man but my past is what built me and is still part of me; less and less though. My wife’s love reassures me, fulfills me and makes me feel strong.”

The birth of his son made him feel strong, too, in a way he had never experienced before. “Tado is an amazing child. Contrary to me, he actually enjoys doing boys’ stuff. I love him so much, I play football with him, which for me was, of course, inconceivable before,” he laughs.

• Me, Myself and Mum is on at Ciné Lumière at the French Institute, London SW7, until 18 December and then on selected release, institut-francais.org.uk