Bambi (Marie-Pierre Pruvot)
For twenty years a star of the Carrousel de Paris – then, for 25 years, a literature teacher in a Paris suburb.
Marie-Pierre Pruvot was born in 1935 in French Algeria and assigned male at birth. She knew early that she was a girl. As a young woman she moved to Paris and began performing under the stage name Bambi.
For around twenty years she was one of the stars of the Carrousel de Paris, the famous cabaret where trans women performed in the 1950s and 1960s, alongside her friend Coccinelle and others. She appeared in films and documentaries and toured the world. She later underwent gender-affirming surgery.
While still performing, she began to study. She earned degrees at the Sorbonne and in 1974 became a teacher of French literature. After two years in Cherbourg she taught for 25 years at a school in Garges-lès-Gonesse, a suburb of Paris – for a long time without her colleagues and pupils knowing about her past. She was honoured with the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Under the name Marie-Pierre Pruvot she published her memoirs, “J’inventais ma vie” (2003) and “Marie parce que c’est joli” (2007). In 2013 the documentary “Bambi” by Sébastien Lifshitz, about her life, won the Teddy Award for best documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival.