when Marion Bartoli wins her semi-final… thanks to Pierce Brosnan

A first significant experience for Marion Bartoli. In 2007, the French player, then 22 years old, qualified for her first semi-final of Wimbledon, the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world. Opposed then to the Belgian Justine Henin, world number one and victorious at Roland-Garros that year, the young tricolor was off to a very bad start. “It was my first match on Center Court, which is the biggest court for any young person who dreams of having a professional tennis career (…). I was totally dominated in the first set”, she remembers in Media culture.

It was before meeting the gaze of a movie celebrity. “Pierce Brosnan was invited for the women’s day, for both semi-finals. Mine was second, and he had come out after the first half for a drink. By the time he came back, I had already lost a set!”, says Marion Bartoli at the microphone of Philippe Vandel.

“He sent me 100 red roses to congratulate me”

The French tennis player therefore did not want to disappoint the man who played agent 007 in the cinema for many years. “When he settled down, I said to myself either I continue to play as badly as that and he will leave after ten minutes, or as I am playing in front of James Bond and he is my favorite actor, I will when even try to move my buttocks and do a little better”, relates Marion Bartoli, now a consultant for Amazon Prime Video.

She indicates that at that moment, she began “to forget the context, the stress of ‘playing’ for him. And when I saw that he was applauding me, that he was encouraging me, I entered into this dynamic and I won the match”, explains the winner of the 2013 edition of Wimbledon. Who talks about his meeting with his favorite actor: “He congratulated me at the end of the match and the next day he sent me 100 red roses to congratulate me even more on the match I had won the day before.”