From Sitcom Star to Homeless, Then Back as Lola

Mallaury Nataf was one of the familiar faces of French youth television in the 1990s, best known for the series Le Miel et les Abeilles. Her life later became very difficult. According to La Dernière Heure, she was without a fixed home for several years. The article describes this as a downward spiral and does not explain exactly how it began or give precise dates.

L'Avenir reports that around 2012 she was homeless and that her children had been taken from her. A few years later her whereabouts were unknown and the producer Jean-Luc Azoulay made a public appeal to find her. In an interview with the magazine Public in August 2018, she said she had been out of the street for eighteen months, after three and a half years on the street spread over a five-year period. She said she had lived for nine months in an apartment in the Paris suburbs that she found on a classified-ads site. She added that she lived day by day and saw herself as a survivor. La Dernière Heure gives August 2018 as the month she had a roof over her head again.

Working was not simple. She said ordinary jobs proved impossible because colleagues and customers recognised her, which made things complicated, and her employer would not keep her on.

In 2019, at the age of 47, she returned to television with AB Productions, the company behind her earlier series. She was cast as Lola Garnier, the cousin of Hélène, played by Hélène Rollès, in Les Mystères de l'amour on TMC. In her words, the only path for rebuilding her life was AB Productions. She did not intend to stay with the show long term and spoke of an upcoming project in the theatre.