Caroline Proust plays police officers as workers, not heroes: small, fast, short of sleep and certain the rules are for other people. Laure Berthaud in Spiral is the proof, one of the great television detectives, and a part she would rather not be asked to repeat.
Fi1m perspective
Watch how Laure Berthaud comes into a room in Spiral. Caroline Proust arrives fast and low, already talking, as if the conversation began in the corridor and the room is getting in its way. She is small next to Thierry Godard's Gilou and never appears to notice. She smokes as if it were part of the job description and sleeps, when she sleeps, as if it were not. Nothing in the performance asks to be liked, and that is the reason it lasted eight series and the reason we watched all of them.
The career before it was theatre first, from the early 1990s, and then screen parts through the decade: Le Péril jeune (1994), and Le Cousin (1997), where she played Fanny, a police officer, and put on the uniform she has been trying to take off ever since. Spiral began in 2005 and ended in 2020. Around it she made films, Scorpion (2007) and Ca$h (2008), and turned up in television made abroad, The Tunnel (2013) and Death in Paradise (2014). Since the commissariat closed there has been Notre Dame (2022) and Marinette (2023), and she has kept working on stage throughout, which is partly a choice and partly a defence.
What she does that other actors in this genre do not is refuse the small vanities. Most television detectives are wrecks with good hair; Berthaud is a wreck, full stop, a worker with a squad to run and a life she runs badly, and Proust plays the bad decisions at exactly the same speed and with the same certainty as the good ones. We caught ourselves, more than once, wanting her to get away with something we would not forgive a real officer, and feeling slightly grubby about it, because she had not for a second asked us to take her side. Godard's Gilou and Fred Bianconi's Tintin are the men she is measured against, and the series is at its best when the three of them are in a car saying nothing.
The cost of all this is obvious. She has been cast as the determined, unglamorous policewoman so often that the industry seems to have forgotten she can do anything else, and she has said so: "Give me nurse, give me everything, but not cop." The first run of Spiral is stiff, and the plots knot too tightly, and neither of those is her fault; start anyway, and stay. We would like to see someone hand her the nurse's uniform. We suspect she would wear it like a cop.
Biography
Caroline Proust is a French actress. She was born on 18 November 1967 in Le Vigan, Gard.
She trained at the conservatoire in Montpellier and later at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique in Paris. Proust began her career in theatre before moving into film and television.
She is best known internationally for playing Captain Laure Berthaud in the series Spiral (2005–2020). Other credits include roles in The Cousin (1997), Ca$h (2008), The Tunnel (2013), Death in Paradise (2014) and Marinette (2023). She has also appeared in stage productions such as August: Osage County and A View from the Bridge.
