“The brief life of La Malibran could be summed up thus: Spanish, born in Paris, she made her debut in Italy, pursued her career in London, married a Frenchman in New York, subsequently married a Belgian, and died in Manchester”.
Sacha Guitry, in “Panorama”, 9 September 1943.

“Like Le Comédien, and Deburau, La Malibran is a film about the passion of theatre and the job of the actor. It is known that it was the play Deburau which reconciled Sacha Guitry and his father after 13 years on bad terms. Clearly there was an autobiographical dimension in the quarrel of Marie Malibran and her father. Deburau dies onstage, in the arms of his son, after a particularly dramatic performance, in which, no longer remembering his sketches as Pierrot, and wanting to speak for once (at least this time) to the audience, he is incapable of producing the least sound. The insuperable silence of Deburau responds no less tragically to the mortal cry of Malibran”.
Yann Lardeau, in Sacha Guitry, cinéaste, edited by Philippe Arnaud, published by the Festival international du film de Locarno, 1993.

“You would like to ask me to talk to you about my film La Malibran. …All I can tell you about it, in any case, is that of course it is not what you would call a film. According to a certain sector of the cinema press which imagines that it takes a position when it is only prejudice, I have never made films – and you may well think that at my age I am not going to start. There are, you see, people to whom it is preferable not to appeal – and to give even more weight to this declaration of principle, I would quote to you that admirable phrase of Diderot with which he began a collection of his Pensées. He says, “If these thoughts please no one, they may merely be bad, but I would consider them detestable if they pleased everyone”.
Unpublished, in Sacha Guitry, Le Cinéma et moi, Paris, Ramsay, 1977