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Romy Schneider was born on 23 September 1938 in Vienna, Austria into a family of actors. Making her film debut at the age of 15, her breakthrough came two years later in the very popular trilogy Sissi (1955). Her mother, supervising her daughter's career, immediately approved Romy's participation in Christine (1958), the remake of Max Ophüls's Playing at Love (1933), where Magda Schneider once starred herself. During the shooting, she fell in love with her co-star Alain Delon and eventually moved with him to Paris. At that time, she started her international career collaborating with famous directors such as Luchino Visconti and Orson Welles. After Delon had broken up with her in 1964, she married Harry Meyen shortly after. Although she gave birth to a boy, David-Christopher, their relationship was difficult, so they divorced in 1975. Being unsatisfied with her personal life, she turned to alcohol and drugs, but her cinematic career -especially in France- remained intact. She was the first actress, receiving the new created César Award as "Best Actress" for her role in That Most Important Thing: Love (1975). Three years later, she was awarded again for A Simple Story (1978). After a short marriage to her former secretary Daniel Biasini, being the father of her daughter Sarah Biasini, she suffered the hardest blow of her life when her son was impaled on a fence in 1981. She never managed to recover from this loss and died on 29 May 1982 in Paris. Although it was suggested she committed suicide caused by an overdose of sleeping pills, she was declared to have died from cardiac arrest.- Actress
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Brigitte Bardot was born on September 28, 1934 in Paris, France. Her father had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance, and she proved to be very adept at it. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modeling career, and found herself in the French magazine "Elle". Her incredible beauty readily apparent, Brigitte next tried films. In 1952, she appeared on screen for the first time as Javotte Lemoine in Crazy for Love (1952). Two more films followed and it was also the same year she married Roger Vadim (the union lasted 3½ years). Capitalizing on her success in French films, Brigitte made her first American production in Act of Love (1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France. Brigitte's explosive sexuality took the United States by storm, and the effect she had on millions of American men who had not seen a woman like her in a long, long time--if ever--was electric. Rise to the phrase "sex kitten" and fascination of her in the United States consisted of magazines photographs and dubbed over French films--good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences--mainly men--into theaters like lemmings. In 1965, she appeared as herself in the American-made Dear Brigitte (1965) with James Stewart (she only appeared in one scene). Just before she turned 40, Brigitte retired from movies after filming The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot (1973). She prefers life outside of stardom. While it enabled her to become internationally famous, it also carried with it annoyances. It was not anything for her to have "fans" enter her house or wander around the grounds of her home in the hopes of getting a glimpse of her or to take something that belonged to her. Paparazzi constantly hounded her with their cameras. She has been so soft-hearted that some people even have taken advantage of her generosity. After her life in the spotlight, Brigitte went on to become a leading spokesperson for animal rights and started the "Foundation Brigitte Bardot" dedicated solely to that cause. Her work in that realm is, perhaps, far greater than any film she could have made. Brigitte has been married to Bernard d'Ormale since 1992 and they reside in St. Tropez with their nearly 50 pets.- Actress
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Catherine Fabienne Deneuve was born October 22, 1943 in Paris, France, to actor parents Renée Simonot and Maurice Dorléac. She made her movie debut in 1957, when she was barely a teenager and continued with small parts in minor films, until Roger Vadim gave her a meatier role in Vice and Virtue (1963). Her breakthrough came with the excellent musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), in which she gave an unforgettable performance as a romantic middle-class girl who falls in love with a young soldier but gets imprisoned in a loveless marriage with another man; the director was the gifted Jacques Demy, who also cast Deneuve in the less successful The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). She then played a schizophrenic killer in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and a married woman who works as a part-time prostitute every afternoon in Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Belle de Jour (1967). She also worked with Buñuel in Tristana (1970) and gave a great performance for François Truffaut in Mississippi Mermaid (1969), a kind of apotheosis of her "frigid femme fatale" persona. In the seventies she didn't find parts of that caliber, but her magnificent work in Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980) as a stage actress in Nazi-occupied Paris revived her career. She was also very good in the epic drama Indochine (1992), for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination (Best Actress). Although the elegant and always radiant Deneuve has never appeared on stage, she is universally hailed as one of the "grandes dames" of French cinema, joining a list that includes such illustrious talents as Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani and the younger Juliette Binoche.- The face of Simone Signoret on the Paris Metro movie posters in March 1982 looked even older than her 61 years. She was still a box-office draw, but the film L'étoile du Nord (1982) would be her last theatrical release; she played the landlady. Signoret had a long film apprenticeship during World War II, mostly as an extra and occasionally getting to speak a single line. She worked without an official permit during the Nazi occupation of France because her father, who had fled to England, was Jewish. Working almost all the time, she made enough as an extra to support her mother and three younger brothers. Her breakthrough to international stardom came when she was 38 with the British film Room at the Top (1958). Her Alice Aisgill, an unhappily-married woman who hopes she has found true love, radiated real warmth in all of her scenes--not just the bedroom scenes. She was the same woman as Dedee, a prostitute who finds true love in Dédée d'Anvers (1948), a film directed by Signoret's first husband, Yves Allégret, a decade earlier. Hollywood beckoned throughout the 1950s, but both Signoret and her second husband, Yves Montand, were refused visas to enter the United States; their progressive political activities did not sit well with the ultra-conservative McCarthy-era mentality that gripped the US at the time. They got visas in 1960 so Montand, a singer, could perform in New York and San Francisco. They were in Los Angeles in March 1960 when Signoret received the Oscar for best actress and stayed on so Montand could play opposite Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love (1960). The Signoret film that is shown most often on TV and got a theatrical re-release in 1995, four decades after it was made is the French thriller Diabolique (1955). The chilly character Signoret plays is proof of her acting ability. More typical of her person is the countess in Ship of Fools (1965), a film that also starred Vivien Leigh ,which more than doubled its chances of being in a video-store or library film collection.
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Over the course of a five-decade career, she starred in nearly 150 films. She is a three-time César Award winner (1977, 1996, 2002), a two-time Molière Award winner, a BAFTA nominee, and a recipient of several international prizes including the Volpi Cup (Best actress) at the 1965 Venice Film Festival for Three Rooms in Manhattan.
Born in 1931, she was raised by her single mother, a midwife from Normandy. After studying to become a midwife like her mother, she enrolled at the prestigious Conservatoire de la rue Blanche in Paris. After graduating in 1954 with the "First Prize in Modern and Classical Comedy", she joined the Comédie Française, where she was a resident actor from 1954-57.
In 1955, she began her film career, making her film debut in Treize à table (1955), but it was with theatre that she started to attract the attention of critics. Her performance in Jean Cocteau's play La Machine à écrire in 1956 was admired by the author who called her "The finest dramatic temperament of the Postwar period"
In 1956 she was awarded the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti as best up-and-coming young actress but only with Luchino Visconti's epic Rocco and His Brothers (1960), she was able to draw the public's attention to her. In 1962, she married Italian actor Renato Salvatori. Travelling back and forth between two film careers in France and Italy, Girardot also worked with renown Italian directors, including Marco Ferreri in the scandalous The Ape Woman (1964).
Famously ignored by French New Wave directors (with the exception of Claude Lelouch), Girardot found her glory in popular cinema alongside more established and traditional directors such as Jean Delannoy, Michel Boisrond, André Cayatte, Gilles Grangier, or André Hunebelle.
By the end of the 1960s, she had become a movie star and a box-office magnet in France with such films as Vice and Virtue (1963); Live for Life (1967); Love Is a Funny Thing (1969); and Death of Love (1970), the fact-based tale of a middle-aged teacher whose affair with a much younger student made her the object of bourgeoisie ridicule. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe, and remains Girardot's biggest box office hit in France.
Throughout the 1970s, Girardot came back and forth between drama and comedy, proving herself an adept comedienne in such successful comedies as Claude Zidi's La zizanie (1978), Michel Audiard's _Elle boit pas, elle fume pas, elle drague pas, mais... elle cause! (1970)_ and Philippe de Broca's Dear Inspector (1977). She also played the mother of upcoming stars like Isabelle Adjani in the hit teen movie The Slap (1974), and Isabelle Huppert in the drama Docteur Françoise Gailland (1976).
The 1980s were less kind, as her film career floundered and parts dwindled. However, Girardot had a major comeback on the big screen playing a peasant wife in Claude Lelouch's Les Misérables (1995).- Actress
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Born in Denmark, she came to Paris at 18. She met Coco Chanel and Pierre Cardin and started as a top model. She met Jean-Luc Godard about a cameo in Breathless (1960), but she had to be naked and she refused to play in the movie. One year later, they wed and she became famous with the "Nouvelle Vague" movies directed by him, Jacques Rivette, and Agnès Varda.
In 1967, Serge Gainsbourg wrote his only film musical Anna (1967) for her, with the hit "Sous le soleil exactement". Then, she went to Hollywood for a few movies and came back to Paris. She wrote and directed Vivre ensemble (1973) after her divorce from Pierre Fabre. She later remarried, to Dennis Berry.- Actress
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When people gave Louis Malle credit for making a star of Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows (1958) immediately followed by The Lovers (1958), he would point out that Moreau by that time had already been "recognized as the prime stage actress of her generation." She had made it to the Comédie Française in her 20s. She had appeared in B-movie thrillers with Jean Gabin and Ascenseur was in that genre. The technicians at the film lab went to the producer after seeing the first week of dailies for Ascenseur and said: "You must not let Malle destroy Jeanne Moreau". Malle explained: "She was lit only by the windows of the Champs Elysées. That had never been done. Cameramen would have forced her to wear a lot of make-up and they would put a lot of light on her, because, supposedly, her face was not photogenic". This lack of artifice revealed Moreau's "essential qualities: she could be almost ugly and then ten seconds later she would turn her face and would be incredibly attractive. But she would be herself".
Moreau has told interviewers that the characters she played were not her. But even the most famous film critic of his generation, Roger Ebert, thinks that she is a lot like her most enduring role, Catherine in François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962). Behind those eyes and that enigmatic smile is a woman with a mind. In a review of The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1993) Ebert wrote: "Jeanne Moreau has been a treasure of the movies for 35 years... Here, playing a flamboyant woman who nevertheless keeps her real thoughts closely guarded, she brings about a final scene of poetic justice as perfect as it is unexpected".
Moreau made her debut as a director in Lumiere (1976) -- also writing the script and playing Sarah, an actress the same age as Moreau whose romances are often with directors for the duration of making a film. She made several films with Malle.
Still active in international cinema, Moreau presided over the jury of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.- Actress
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Isabelle Huppert was born March 16, 1953, in Paris, France, but spent her childhood in Ville d'Avray. Encouraged by her mother Annick Huppert (who was a teacher of English), she followed the Conservatory of Versailles and won an acting prize for her work in Alfred de Musset's "Un caprice". She then studied at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique and followed an illustrious theatrical career, which includes Ivan Turgenev's "A Month in the Country", Euripides' "Medea" (title role) etc. She made her movie debut in Le Prussien (1971) and soon became one of the top actresses of her generation, giving fine performances in important films, like Claude Goretta's The Lacemaker (1977), as a simple-minded girl who falls in love with - and is betrayed by - a student, Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself (1980), as a prostitute, and Maurice Pialat's Loulou (1980), as an upper-class woman who is physically attracted by a young vagabond. She made an inconsequential US debut in Otto Preminger's Rosebud (1975) before playing a brothel madam in Michael Cimino's disastrous Heaven's Gate (1980), but she fared better in Curtis Hanson's The Bedroom Window (1987) (as an adulteress who witnesses an attack). Huppert has an extremely productive collaboration with Claude Chabrol, who cast her in several movies, including Violette (1978), in which she played a woman who murders her parents, and Story of Women (1988), in which she gave an excellent performance as a shameless abortionist, the last woman to be executed in France. More recent good films include Patricia Mazuy's Saint-Cyr (2000) and Michael Haneke's controversial The Piano Teacher (2001), as a sexually repressed piano teacher.- Actress
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Isabelle Yasmine Adjani was born in Gennevilliers, Hauts-de-Seine, a suburb of Paris, to Emma Augusta "Gusti" (Schweinberger) and Mohammed Adjani. Her father was a Kabyle Algerian, from Iferhounène, and her mother was a Bavarian German. She grew up speaking German fluently. After winning a school recitation contest, she began acting in amateur theater by the age of twelve. At the age of 14, she starred in her first motion picture, Le Petit Bougnat (1970). Adjani has appeared in 30 films since 1970. She holds the record for most César Award for Best Actress (5), which she won for Possession (1981), One Deadly Summer (1983) (aka "One Deadly Summer"), Camille Claudel (1988), Queen Margot (1994) (aka "Queen Margot") and Skirt Day (2008) (aka "Skirt Day"). She was also given a double Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award in 1981. She also received two Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. She performs in French, English, Italian and German. Adjani was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 2010.- Actress
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Actress Bérénice Bejo was born in Buenos Aires, the daughter of Silvia De Paoli, a lawyer, and Miguel Bejo, a filmmaker. When she was three, Bejo's family relocated to Paris, France. She embarked on a successful acting career in the 1990s, with various roles in French television and film productions. She made her American film debut as Christiana in A Knight's Tale (2001), but came to major international recognition with her role as Peppy Miller in the critical and popular hit, The Artist (2011), which was written and directed by her husband, Michel Hazanavicius. The film garnered many major awards and nominations. Bejo herself was nominated as Best Supporting Actress of the year at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Oscars. She was also nominated as Best Leading Actress at the BAFTA Awards.- Actress
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Stéphane Audran was born on November 8, 1932 in Versailles, Seine-et-Oise [now Yvelines], France as Colette Suzanne Jeannine Dacheville. She was an actress, known for Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie (1972), Babettes Fest (1987) and Der Schlachter (1970). She was married to Claude Chabrol and Jean-Louis Trintignant. She died at the age of 85 on March 27, 2018 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France after an illness.- Actress
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This beautiful, dark-haired French actress made a hit with a supporting role in her first film, as the piano teacher in Louis Malle's "Au revoir, les enfants" (1987). Educated in London and Geneva, and a Paris resident since the age of 18, Jacob became a promising starlet with her Malle success and followed up with another small role in Jacques Rivette's "La bande des quatre/The Gang of Four" (1989). 5Stardom (and a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award) arrived with Jacob's dual role as two women whose lives are mysteriously linked in Krzysztof Kieslowski's psychological drama "The Double Life of Veronique" (1991). She ventured to the US for a ronantic comedy, "Trusting Beatrice" (1991), fittingly, about a young French woman's arrival in the US. After the small film "The Van Gogh Wake" (1993), she played the ill-fated mother in Agnieszka Holland's touching and acclaimed "The Secret Garden" (1993). Several more small French films followed, but it took a reunion with Kieslowski to jump-start Jacob's career again. In his "Red/Rouge" (1994), the final segment of his "Three Colors" trilogy (and his swan song), Jacob starred as a Swiss fashion model who meets a cynical aging ex-judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) after she runs over his dog. In the film, she served as an emotional and spiritual curative for the old man; the second time, Kieslowski employed Jacob as a woman who offers a man consolation and mystery. Jacob followed up as a religious devotee in Michaelango Antonioni's episodic "Beyond the Clouds/Par-dela les nuages" (1995), then ventured to England to play Desdemona to Laurence Fishburne's "Othello" (also 1995). Jacob has several foreign-made films in the can which have not yet been released in the US: she plays an East Indian beauty with Willem Defoe and Sam Neill in "Victory" (filmed in 1994), an ill-fated vacationer in "Fugueuses/Runaway" and a French actress in 1948 who befriends a mysterious tramp (Stephen Rea) in "All Men Are Mortal" (both shown at Cannes in 1995).- Actress
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Carole Bouquet is a French actress and fashion model. She is best known for played Bond girl Melina Havelock in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981).
She also starred in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Nemo (1984), The Bridge (1999) and Do Not Disturb (2014).
In 2017 she starred in the Mini-Series The Mantis.
In the 1980s and 1990s she was a model for Chanel.
That Obscure Object of Desire was her film debut.- Actress
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Anna Mouglalis was born on 26 April 1978 in Fréjus, Var, France. She is an actress and director, known for Romanzo Criminale (2005), Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009) and Baron noir (2016). She was previously married to Vincent Raes.- The radiant Françoise Dorléac is better remembered today as the elder, ill-fated sister of French film star Catherine Deneuve. The Paris-born actress, however, was actually the first to become a star and had quite a formidable career of her own in the 1960s until it was cut short. Born into a theatrical family in 1942 (her father was actor Maurice Dorléac), Françoise first appeared on stage at the age of 10.
Entering the film industry with the movie short Mensonges (1957), she studied at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique (1959-1961) and had modeled for Christian Dior by the time she started making any kind of cinematic impact. Slim, gamine, pale-skinned and a real brunette stunner, Françoise graced a number of movies before hitting celebrity stardom with François Truffaut's melodrama The Soft Skin (1964) and the classic James Bond-like spy spoof That Man from Rio (1964), both released in 1964. The two films showed the polar sides of Françoise's incredible allure and talent. In the former she played an airline stewardess who falls into a tragic affair with a married businessman (Jean Desailly) and in the latter she played a fun and flaky heroine opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo. Unlike Catherine, Françoise proved a carefree, outgoing presence both on and off camera. Known for her chic, stylish ways and almost unbridled sense of joie-de-vivre, she continued making strong marks as the adulterous wife in Roman Polanski's black comedy Cul-de-sac (1966) and even joined Gene Kelly, George Chakiris, and her sister, who was now a cinematic star by this time too, in the rather candy-coated The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), a colorful movie which paid homage to the Hollywood musical. She and Catherine, who looked quite similar, played singing twins who dream about living in Paris.
Her fun and funny side was always an asset and often revealed as in the films as Arsène Lupin contre Arsène Lupin (1962) and Male Hunt (1964). Branching out now in such non-French movies as Genghis Khan (1965), Where the Spies Are (1965), and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the luminous Françoise was on the brink of international stardom when her rental car flipped and burned on a roadway in Nice, France on June 26, 1967. She was near completion of the last film mentioned at the time the accident occurred. Her part in the movie was left intact. Her early death at age 25 most certainly robbed the cinema of a tried and true talent and incomparably beautiful mademoiselle who showed every sign of taking Hollywood by storm, as Catherine later did. - Actress
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Virginie Ledoyen was born Virginie Fernandez on 15 November 1976 in Aubervilliers, near Paris. At the age of 2, she was already shooting advertisements for television. At 9, she started going to the École des Enfants du Spectacle, and made her film debut at 10 in What Every Frenchwoman Wants (1986). She was then nominated for the César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for most promising actress in 1993, 1994 and 1995.
Her international breakthrough was in 1999, when she became ambassador for the cosmetics L'Oréal; this led to her casting in The Beach (2000), with Leonardo DiCaprio.- Actress
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Aïssa Maïga is a Senegalsese actress working in France. She was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1975 to a Senegalese-Gambian mother and Malian father, an acclaimed journalist. She moved with her family to France when she was 4. She discovered her vocation as an actress in middle school, and won various professional roles while studying theater in high school. Her big screen début was in Saraka bô (1997), directed by Denis Amar.
Since then, Aïssa has worked with a number of internationally renowned directors, including Michel Gondry (in Mood Indigo (2013), Abderrahmane Sissako (in Bamako (The Court) (2006)), and Michael Haneke (in Code Unknown (2000) and Caché (2005)). Throughout, Aïssa has continued to perform onstage in celebrated plays such as "Brooklyn Boy" (2004), "Les Grandes Personnes" (2011), and the French production of David Lindsay-Abaire's "Good People" (2015).
Aïssa is at ease in a wide range of film roles, from African to young parishioner, aided by her fluency in multiple languages. She has won or been nominated for a number of prestigious prizes, including a Best Newcomer César (French Oscar) nomination in 2007 for Bamako (The Court) (2006) and the Best Actress Prize in 2009 at the Bastia Film Festival for Bianco e nero (2008) by Italian director Cristina Comencini. She also won the Best Actress Prize in 2013 at the Luchon Film festival for her role in Denis Malleval's Deadly Summer (2013), as well as the Crystal Globe for Best Actress in 2016 for her role in Anything for Alice (2014).
From comedic and dramatic roles to genre and action movies, from popular to art house films, Aïssa Maïga has become one of the unforgettable faces of international cinema.- Marie-Lorna Vaconsin was born on 2 May 1979 in Paris, France. She is an actress, known for I Am Not an Easy Man (2018), French Kiss (2004) and La fête des voisins (2010).
- Marine Vacth was born on April 9, 1991 in Paris. She grew up in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Alfort with a younger brother. She had difficult childhood growing up with a violent father, a lorry driver - his company is named after his daughter Marine, and a mother, an accountant at Malaysia Airlines, "who pacified nothing". The enduring passion of Marine's youth was judo, which she did for seven years until the age of 17, reaching brown belt. When she was 15, she was spotted by a model agent while she was shopping with her mother in H&M department store. She found modeling as an escape from troublesome family. She was educated at the Lycée Eugène Delacroix in Maisons-Alforts. Despite being good at her studies, she felt cramped and ended school without having waited for the certificate and has gone to Paris. The beautiful brunette quickly went on to be photographed by the likes of Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Juergen Teller or Paolo Roversi. In 2011, she succeeded Kate Moss as the face of YSL's Parisienne perfume and became a face of many prestigious fashion houses as Chloé, Louis Vuitton, or Ralph Lauren. The director Cédric Klapisch noticed the mysterious beauty of Marine and gave her the role of Tessa in My Piece of the Pie (2011) in 2011. Despite a critical failure, Marine immediately caught eye of Alexandre Arcady and gained a small role in his film What the Day Owes the Night (2012) and Joan Chemla's short The Man with the Golden Brain (2012). She also auditioned for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and was part of the final four candidates. Unfortunately, she didn't get the role. Around this time, French director François Ozon was looking for a lead actress to cast in his new movie Young & Beautiful (2013). After seeing Marine on the cover of Libération Next, he decided she's the right girl to portrait Isabelle, adolescent girl who leads a secret life as a call girl. In 2013, the movie was presented in Cannes and received a critical success. This experience definitively convinced Marine to pursue acting as a profession. The breakthrough role of Isabelle led Marine to roles in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Families (2015), The Confession (2016), directed by Nicolas Boukhrief (2016) and recently she worked again with director François Ozon in erotic thriller Double Lover (2017). This movie took Marine to Cannes in 2017 for the second time. In January 2018 is released Marine's newest movie If You Saw His Heart (2017) by Joan Chemla, co-starring with Gael García Bernal. On the private side, Marine is very discreet. She doesn't use any social media and doesn't like giving interviews and if so, she chooses her words very carefully. She is living with a photographer Paul Schmidt, with whom she has a son Henri, born on the March 15, 2014. She also owns a cat named Alphonse. Marine describes herself as pragmatic and introvert, yet she likes to take risks as an actress. Marine is an ambassador of the Parisian fashion house Chanel and recently featured in their Cruise 2017/18 campaign. Marine is one of the best young French actresses with a huge career ahead of her.
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French actress Léa Seydoux was born in 1985 in Paris, France, to Valérie Schlumberger, a philanthropist, and Henri Seydoux, a businessman. Her grandfather, Jérôme Seydoux, is chairman of Pathé, and her father is a great-grandson of businessman and inventor Marcel Schlumberger (her mother also descends from the Schlumberger family). Her parents are both of mixed French and Alsatian German descent, with more distant Venezuelan (Spanish, Basque) roots on her father's side.
Léa began her acting career in French cinema, appearing in films such as The Last Mistress (2007) and On War (2008). She first came to attention after she received her first César Award nomination for her performance in The Beautiful Person (2008), and won the Trophée Chopard, an award given to promising actors at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then, she has appeared in major Hollywood films including Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), Ridley Scott's Robin Hood (2010), Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011), and Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011). In French cinema, she was nominated for the César Award for Most Promising Actress for a second time for her role in Belle Épine (2010) and was nominated for the César Award for Best Actress for the film Farewell, My Queen (2012).
In 2013, Seydoux came to widespread attention when Seydoux and co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos, alongside director Abdellatif Kechiche, were awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, for their involvement in the critically acclaimed film Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)). As a special prize for their roles, Along with Jane Campion, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos are the only women to have ever won a Palme d'Or.
That same year, she also received the Lumières Award for Best Actress for the film Grand Central and, in 2014, she was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award and starred in the films Beauty and the Beast, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Saint Laurent. In 2015 she played Madeleine Swann in the 24th James Bond film Spectre.- Actress
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Sandrine Bonnaire was born on 31 May 1967 in Gannat, Allier, France. She is an actress and director, known for La Cérémonie (1995), To Our Loves (1983) and Vagabond (1985). She was previously married to Guillaume Laurant.- Actress
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Emmanuelle Béart was born August 14, 1963, in Gassin, France. She lived with her mother, brothers, and sister on a farm not far from Saint-Tropez in Provence (southern France), because her father, singer and poet Guy Béart, did not want his children to be affected by the glamour world of Paris. When Emmanuelle was thirteen, she saw Romy Schneider in the movie Mado (1976). From that time on, she wanted to be an actress. In Emmanuelle's teens, her parents sent her to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, for four years, so she could learn English. There, she was engaged for a Robert Altman movie that was never made. After returning to France, she took drama classes and got her first TV role, in Raison perdue (1984). David Hamilton, the photographer/director, was impressed by her beauty and gave her a role in First Desires (1983). She met her spouse-to-be, Daniel Auteuil, while making Love on the Quiet (1985). The film that made her famous in France was Manon of the Spring (1986), in which she played the role of a blonde shepherd dancing nude in the fields. Director Tom McLoughlin chose her out of 5,000 candidates for her first Hollywood picture, Date with an Angel (1987). Emmanuelle is a very sensitive and a perfectionist. For the part of Camille in the film A Heart in Winter (1992), she took violin lessons for a whole year. Her biggest success was as a nude model in the art film La Belle Noiseuse (1991), which starred Michel Piccoli and was directed by Jacques Rivette.- Actress
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Delphine was born in Beirut on the 10th April 1932 into an intellectual Protestant family. Her Alsatian father, Henri Seyrig, was the director of the Archaeological Institute and later France's cultural attaché in New York during World War Two. Her Swiss mother, Hermine De Saussure, was an adept of Rousseau's theories, a female sailing pioneer and the niece of the universally acclaimed linguist and semiologist, Ferdinand De Saussure. Delphine also had a brother, Francis Seyrig, who would go on to become a successful composer. At the end of the war, the family relocated to Paris, although Delphine's adolescence was to be spent between her country, Greece and New York. Never a good student, she decided to quit school at age 17 to pursue a stage career. Her father gave her his approval on the condition that she would have done this with seriousness and dedication. Delphine took courses of Dramatic Arts with some illustrious teachers such as Roger Blin, Pierre Bertin and Tania Balachova. Some of her fellow students included Jean-Louis Trintignant, Michael Lonsdale, Laurent Terzieff, Bernard Fresson, Stéphane Audran, Daniel Emilfork and Antoine Vitez. Her stage debut came in 1952 in a production of Louis Ducreux's musical "L'Amour en Papier", followed by roles in "Le Jardin du Roi" (Pierre Devaux) and in Jean Giraudoux's "Tessa, la nymphe au Coeur fidèle". Stage legend Jean Dasté was the first director to offer her a couple of parts that would truly showcase her talents: Ariel in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and Chérubin in Beaumarchais' "The Marriage of Figaro". He also had her take the title role in a production of Giraudoux's "Ondine" from Odile Versois, who had gone to England to shoot an Ealing movie. Delphine's performance was greeted with enormous critical approval. The young actress stayed in Europe for a couple years more, starring in a production of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" in Paris, making two guest appearances in Sherlock Holmes (1954) (which was entirely shot in France) and trying to enter the TNP (People's National Theatre). She actually wasn't admitted because the poetic, melodious voice that would become her signature mark was deemed too strange. In 1956, Delphine decided to sail for America along with her husband Jack Youngerman (a painter she had married in Paris) and son Duncan.
Delphine tried to enter the Actor's studio, but, just like in the case of many of Hollywood's finest actors, she failed the admittance test. She would still spend three years as an observer (also attending Lee Strasberg's classes) and this minor mishap didn't prevent her from going on with her stage career anyway, as she did theatre work in Connecticut and appeared in an off-Broadway production of Pirandello's "Henry IV" opposite Burgess Meredith and Alida Valli. Legend wants that the show was such a flop that the producer burned down the set designs. One year later, a single meeting would change the young actress' life forever. Delphine was starring in a production of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" when one very day she was approached by a very enthusiast spectator. It was the great director Alain Resnais, fresh of the huge personal triumph he had scored with his masterwork, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Resnais was now trying to do a movie about the pulp magazine character Harry Dickson (an American version of Sherlock Holmes) and thought that Delphine could have played the role of the detective's nemesis, Georgette Cuvelier/The Spider. The project would never see the light of the day, but this meeting would soon lead to the genesis of an immortal cinematic partnership. Delphine's first feature film was also done the same year: it was the manifesto of the Beat Generation, the innovative Pull My Daisy (1959). The 30 minutes film was written and narrated by Jack Kerouac and featured an almost entirely non-professional cast including poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky along with painter Larry Rivers. Delphine played Rivers' wife in this well-done and interesting curio, an appropriate starting point to a very intriguing and alternative career. In 1960 she landed the role of Cara Williams and Harry Morgan's French neighbour in a new sitcom, Pete and Gladys (1960). Although she left the show after only three episodes, it is interesting to see her interact with the likes of Williams, Morgan and Cesar Romero, since they seem to belong to such different worlds. This was going to be the end of Delphine's journey in the States, although she would keep very fond memories of this period, stating in 1969 that she didn't consider herself "particularly French, but American in equal measure". In 1961 she would take her native France by storm.
Resnais had now been approached by writer Alain Robbe-Grillet- one of the main creators of the "Nouveau Roman" genre- to direct a movie based upon his script "L'anneé dernière". Having been awed by the recent Vertigo (1958), Robbe-Grillet was nourishing the hope that Kim Novak could have possibly played the mysterious female protagonist of the upcoming adaptation of his novel. Luckily, Resnais had different plans. Delphine was back in France for a holiday when the director offered her the role of the enigmatic lady nicknamed A. in his latest movie, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Delphine accepted and finally took her rightful place in film history. The plot of the movie is apparently simple: in a baroque-looking castle, X. (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince the reclusive A. that they had an affair the previous year. The movie has been interpreted in many different ways: a ghost story, a sci-fi story, an example of meta-theatre, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a retelling of Pygmalion and the Statue and plenty more. Resnais proved to be very partial to Delphine and didn't want her to just stand there like a motionless mannequin like the entire supporting cast did. As X. begins to instill or awake some feelings and memories into A., Delphine subtly hints at a change happening inside the character, managing to alternatively project an image of innocence and desire in a brilliant way. With her stunning, sphinx-like beauty being particularly highlighted by raven-black hair (Resnais wanted her to look like Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box (1929)) and her warm, seductive voice completing the magical charm of the character, Delphine made A. her most iconic-looking creation and got immediately welcomed to the club of the greatest actresses of France. The movie itself received the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival and remains Resnais' masterpiece, not to mention possibly the greatest son of the French New Wave. The gothic organ music provided by Delphine's brother Francis also played an important role in the success of "Marienbad".
Like he had done a couple years before with Emmanuelle Riva, Resnais had made another invaluable gift to French cinema and one would have expected to see Delphine immediately racking a dozen film projects after "Marienbad", but for the time being she preferred to return to her first love, the theatre. She always wished to avoid the perils of celebrity and started a very turbulent relationship with reporters. She made this statement on the subject: "There is nothing to say about an actor or an actress. You just need to go and see them, that's all". She also hated the fact that, after "Marienbad", many journalists had paraphrased many of her statements in order to get meatier articles or entirely made up stories about her. Her next film project came in 1963 when she was reunited with Resnais for the superb Muriel (1963). Wearing some makeup that made her look plainer and older, Delphine gave a first sample of her chameleon-like abilities and one of her most spectacular performances ever as Hélène Aughain, an apparently absent-minded, but actually very tragic antique shop dealer who tries to reshape her squalid present in order to get even with a past made of shame and humiliation. Providing her character with a clumsy walk and an odd behavior that looks amusing on the surface, she delegated her subtlest facial expressions to hint at Hélène's grief and sense of dissatisfaction, creating a very pathetic and moving figure in the process. This incredible achievement was awarded with a Volpi cup at Venice Film Festival. Delphine felt very proud for herself and for Resnais. "Muriel" turned out to be one of the director's most divisive works, with some people considering it his finest film and others dismissing it as a product below his standard. The movie's American reception was unfortunately disastrous: having been released in New York disguised as an "even more mysterious sequel" to Marienbad, it stayed in theaters for five days only. The same year, Delphine did a TV movie called Le troisième concerto (1963) which marked her first collaboration with Marcel Cravenne. Her performance as a pianist who's seemingly losing her mind scored big with both critics and audience and made her much more popular with the French public than two rather inaccessible movies such as "Marienbad" and "Muriel" could ever do. Delphine never considered herself a star though, stating that "a star is like a racing horse a producer can place money on" and that she wasn't anything like that. In the following years she kept doing remarkable stage work. 1964 saw her first collaboration with Samuel Beckett: she invited the great author at her place in Place Des Vosges where she rehearsed for the role of the Lover in the first French production of "Play" along with Michael Lonsdale as the Husband and Eléonore Hirt as the Wife. The three of them would then bring the show to the stage and star in a film version in 1966. Delphine would team up with Beckett on other occasions in the future and even more frequently with Lonsdale, her co-star in several films and stage productions. For two consecutive times she won the "Prix Du Syndicat de la Critique" (the most ancient and illustrious award given by French theatre critics) for Best Actress: in 1967 (1966/1967 season) for her performances in "Next Time I'll Sing to You" and "To Find Oneself" and in 1969 (1968/1969 season) for her work in L'Aide-mémoire. In 1966 she did a cameo in the surreal, Monty Pythonesque Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), which was written and directed by William Klein (her friend of about 20 years) and starred Sami Frey, who would be her partner for her entire life after her separation from Youngerman. In 1967, she had a few exquisitely acted scenes (all shot in one day and a half) with Dirk Bogarde in Joseph Losey's excellent Accident (1967). Her appearance as Bogarde's old flame seemed to echo and pay homage to "Marienbad", from the almost illusory touch of the whole sequence to the suggestive use of music by the great John Dankworth. Delphine totally enjoyed to work with Losey, although their relationship would drastically change by the time of their next adventure together. The same year would also see the release of the spellbinding The Music (1967), her first filmed collaboration with Marguerite Duras. The author had always worshiped Delphine for her exceptional screen presence and for possessing the aura of a classic goddess of the Golden Age of Hollywood. She said about her: "When Delphine Seyrig moves into the camera's field, there's a flicker of Garbo and Clara Bow and we look to see if Cary Grant is at her side". She also loved her sexy voice, stating that she always sounded like "she had just sucked a sweet fruit and her mouth was still moist" and would go on to call her "the greatest actress in France and possibly in the entire world". "La Musica" isn't the most remembered Seyrig-Duras collaboration, but nevertheless occupies a special place in history as the beginning of a beautiful friendship between two artists that would become strictly associated with each other for eternity. Delphine's performance won her the "Étoile de Cristal" (the top film award given in France by the "Académie Française" between 1955 and 1975 and later replaced by the César). The actress later made a glorious Hedda Gabler for French television, although she never much enjoyed to do work for this kind of medium. She often complained about the poverty of means and little professionalism of French TV and declined on several occasions the possibility to play the role of Mme De Mortsauf in an adaptation of Balzac's "Le lys dans la vallée". In 1968 she found one of her most famous and celebrated roles in François Truffaut's latest installment of the Antoine Doinel saga, Stolen Kisses (1968), which overall qualifies as one of her most "traditional" career choices. Delphine's new divine creature was Fabienne Tabard, the breathtakingly beautiful wife of an obnoxious shoe store owner (Michael Lonsdale) and the latest object of Antoine's attention. It is very interesting that, in the movie, Antoine reads a copy of "Le lys dans la vallée" and compares Fabienne to the novel's heroine. At one point, Delphine had almost agreed to appear in the TV production on the condition that Jean-Pierre Léaud would have played the leading male role. She later inquired with Truffaut if he knew about this by the time he had written the script, but he swore that it was just a coincidence. In 1969 she declined the leading female role in The Swimming Pool (1969) because she didn't see anything interesting about it; this despite strong soliciting from her close friend Jean Rochefort (whom she nicknamed "Mon petit Jeannot"). At the time, it was considered almost inconceivable to decline the chance of appearing in an Alain Delon movie, but Delphine really valued the power of saying "no" and the part went to Romy Schneider instead. It consequently came of great surprise when, the same year, she accepted the role of Marie-Madeleine in William Klein's rather dated, but somewhat charming Mr. Freedom (1968), where she played most of her scenes semi-naked. But Delphine, as usual, had her valid reasons to appear in this strong satire of American Imperialism. Klein's comic strip adaptation isn't without its enjoyable moments (like a scene where the Americans use a map to indicate the Latin dictatorships as the civilized, democratic world), but goes on for too long and suffers every time Delphine disappears from the screen. Still, it remains a must for Seyrig fans, as you'd never expect to see the most intellectual of actresses having a martial arts fight with the gigantic John Abbey and giving a performance of pure comic genius in the tradition of Kay Kendall. The same year she also had a cameo as the Prostitute in Luis Buñuel's masterful The Milky Way (1969). Delphine read the entire script, but eventually regretted that she hadn't watched Alain Cuny playing his scene, because, in that case, she would have played her own very differently and brought the movie to full circle, something she thought she hadn't done. She promised Buñuel to do better on the next occasion they would have worked together.
In 1970, Delphine eventually agreed to appear in Le lys dans la vallée (1970) under the direction of Marcel Cravenne, although the male protagonist wasn't played by Léaud, but by Richard Leduc. It turned out to be one of the best ever adaptations of a French classic and her performance was titanic. She then played the Lilac Fairy in Jacques Demy's lovely musical Donkey Skin (1970), which starred a young Catherine Deneuve in the title role, but boosted a superlative supporting cast including Jacques Perrin, Micheline Presle, Sacha Pitoëff and Jean Marais (who sort of provided a link with Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946)). Despite all this profusion of talent, Delphine effortlessly stole the movie with her sassy smile, impeccable comedic timing and multi-colored wardrobe. Although she would go on to sing on future occasions, Demy preferred to have her musical number dubbed by Christiane Legrand. The following year, she won a new multitude of male admirers when she arguably played the sexiest and most memorable female vampire in film history in the underrated psychological horror Daughters of Darkness (1971). The choice of a niche actress like Delphine to play the lesbian, Dietrichesque Countess Bathory is considered one of the main factors that sets Harry Kümel's movie apart from the coeval products made by the likes of Jesús Franco or Jean Rollin. To see another horror movie highlighted by the presence of an unforgettable female vampire in Seyrig style, one will have to wait for the similar casting of the splendid Nina Hoss in the auteur effort We Are the Night (2010). Cravenne's Tartuffe (1971) was a delicious "Jeu à Deux" between Delphine and the immense Michel Bouquet. In 1972, Delphine would add another immortal title to her filmography, as she was cast in Luis Buñuel's surrealist masterpiece, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). As the adulterous Simone Thévenot, always wearing a sanctimoniously polite smile, she managed to give the star turn in a flawless cast: Fernando Rey made his Rafael Acosta deliciously nasty behind his cover of unflappability, Paul Frankeur was hilariously obtuse as M.Thévenot, Jean-Pierre Cassel suitably ambiguous as M.Sénéchal, Julien Bertheau looked charmingly sinister as Mons.Dufour, Bulle Ogier got to show her formidable gifts for physical comedy as Florence and the role of Alice Sénéchal, a woman who gets annoyed at not getting coffee while a man has just confessed to have murdered his father, proved for once the perfect fit for the coldest and least emotional of actresses, Stéphane Audran. The movie won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The next year, Delphine appeared in a couple of star-studded productions: she gave a brief, but memorably moving performance in Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973) as a French woman who makes the fatal mistake of falling for Edward Fox's ruthless killer. People's memories of the movie are often associated with her scenes. She also appeared in Losey's disappointing A Doll's House (1973) opposite a badly miscast Jane Fonda as Nora. The two actresses didn't get along with the director as they both thought his vision of the story to be deeply misogynist. Many key dialogues were unskillfully butchered for the adaptation, diminishing the depth of the characters and the end result was consequently cold, although the movie has its redeeming features. The brilliant David Warner arguably remains the definitive screen Torvald and Delphine is typically impeccable in the fine role of Kristine, although one can't help but think that an accomplished Ibsenian actress like her should have played Nora in the first place. Although Losey wasn't in speaking terms with her any longer by the time the shooting ended, Delphine befriended Jane as they shared a lot of ideals and causes. Delphine Seyrig was of course a vocal feminist, although she didn't consider herself a militant: she actually believed that women should have already known their rights by then and that she didn't have to cause any consciousness raising in them. She would go on to work with more and more female directors shortly after, considering also that she had now begun to love cinema as much as theatre. In 1974 she appeared in a stage production of "La Cheuvachée sur le lac de Constance" because she dearly desired to act opposite the wonderful Jeanne Moreau, but from that moment on, most of her energies were saved for film work. She also grew more and more radical in picking up her projects: Le journal d'un suicidé (1972), Dites-le avec des fleurs (1974) and Der letzte Schrei (1975) certainly qualify as some of her oddest features, not to mention the most difficult to watch. Le cri du coeur (1974), although flawed by an inept performance by Stéphane Audran, was slightly more interesting: the director capitalized on Delphine's Marienbad image once again, casting her as a mysterious woman the crippled young protagonist gets sexually obsessed with. She made another relatively "ordinary" pick by playing villainous in Don Siegel's remarkable spy thriller The Black Windmill (1974) alongside stellar performers like Michael Caine, Donald Pleasence, John Vernon and Janet Suzman.
The following year, Delphine had two first rate roles in Le jardin qui bascule (1975) and in Liliane de Kermadec's Aloïse (1975) (where her younger self was played, quite fittingly, by an already prodigious Isabelle Huppert). But 1975 wasn't over for Delphine as the thespian would round off the year with two of her most amazing achievements. The Seyrig/Duras team did finally spring into action again with the memorable India Song (1975), another movie which lived and died entirely on Delphine's intense face. Laure Adler wrote these pertinent words in her biography of Duras: "In India Song we see nothing of Calcutta, all we see is a woman dancing in the drawing room of the French embassy and that is enough, for Delphine fills the screen". Coming next was what many people consider the actress' most monumental personal achievement: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). It has become a common saying that, when you have a great interest in an actor, you could watch him/her reading the phone book. Seyrig fans can experiment it almost literally in Chantal Akerman's three hour minimalist masterpiece, which meticulously follows the daily routine of widowed housewife Jeanne. Akerman chose Delphine "because she brought with her all the roles of mythical woman that she played until now. The woman in Marienbad, The woman in India Song". The movie can be considered a filmed example of "Nouveau Roman": every moment of Jeanne's day is presented almost real-time -from the act of peeling potatoes or washing dishes- and every gesture has a precise meaning, like Jeanne's incapacity of putting her life together being expressed by her inability of making a decent coffee or put buttons back on a shirt. The movie is also of course a feminist declaration: Jeanne regularly resorts to prostitution to make a living, which (according to Akerman) symbolizes that, even after the death of her husband, she's still dependant of him and always needs to have a male figure enter her life in his place. Her declaration of independence is expressed at the end of the movie through the murder of one of her clients. Delphine's approach to the role was as natural as possible and she completely disappeared into it, giving a hypnotic performance that keeps the viewer glued to his chair and prevents him to feel the sense of boredom every actress short of extraordinary would have induced. It's considered one of the greatest examples of acting ever recorded by a camera and possibly the definitive testament to Delphine's abilities. By now she was being referred as France's greatest actress with the same frequency Michel Piccoli was called the greatest actor. 1976 saw the the Césars replacing the "Étoiles de Cristal" and Delphine was nominated for "India Song", but she lost to Romy Schneider for her work in That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) by Andrzej Zulawski. The same year also saw her getting behind the camera as she directed Scum Manifesto (1976), a short where she read the Valerie Solanas text by the same name. She also starred in Duras' new version of "India Song", Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta (1976) (where the setting was changed to the desert) and headlined the cast of Mario Monicelli's Caro Michele (1976). In 1977 she traveled to the UK to shoot an episode of BBC Play of the Month (1965). She stated her great admiration for British TV as opposed to French TV, congratulating BBC for its higher production values and for its major respect for the material it used to produce. Thinking retrospectively about the whole thing, these sentiments seem rather misplaced, since BBC erased tons of programs from existence in order to make room in the storage and for other reasons, but fortunately "The Ambassadors" wasn't part of the slaughter. Like Henry James's story, the cast featured some veritable cultural ambassadors as three different nations offered one of their most talented thespians ever: Paul Scofield represented England, Lee Remick represented United States and Delphine represented France as Madame De Vionnet. Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) marked her final and most forgettable film collaboration with Duras. In Faces of Love (1977), she played the drug-addicted ex-wife of a director (a typically outstanding Jean-Louis Trintignant) who summons her along with two other actresses to shoot a film version of "The Three Sisters". She was again nominated for a César, but the sentimentality factor played in favor of Simone Signoret's performance in Moshé Mizrahi's award-friendly Madame Rosa (1977), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film two months later. Mizrahi later cast both actresses in his subsequent feature, I Sent a Letter to My Love (1980), also starring Jean Rochefort. This bittersweet feature proved much better than the director's previous work: Signoret and Rochefort gave great performances, but, once again, Delphine was best in show as a naive, hare-brained woman so much different from her usual characters and gave another confirmation of her phenomenal range. She was nominated for another César in the supporting actress category, but lost to Nathalie Baye for Every Man for Himself (1980). It's ironic that, despite being considered the nation's top actress by so many people, Delphine never won a César. One theory is that she had alienated many voters (particularly the older ones) by often dismissing 50's French cinema and regularly comparing French actors unfavorably to American ones, just like many New Wave authors (Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette) had done back in the days when they worked as critics for the "Cahiérs Du Cinema" and none of them ever won a César either (or at least not a competitive one). This along with having made many enemies because of her vocally feminist attitude of course. She once stated herself that many people in France probably disliked her because she was always saying what she thought.
In the 80's, Delphine appeared in three stage plays that were later filmed: La Bête dans la Jungle (a Duras adaptation of the Henry James novel), "Letters Home" (about the poet Sylvia Plath) and "Sarah et le cri de la langouste" (where she played the legendary Sarah Bernhardt). She scored a particular success with the latter and won the "Prix Du Syndicat de la Critique" for a record third time, more than any other actress (Michel Bouquet is her male counterpart with three Best Actor wins). In 1981, she directed a feminist documentary, Sois belle et tais-toi! (1981), where she interviewed many actresses, including her friend Jane Fonda, about their role (sometimes purely decorative) in the male-dominated film industry. In 1982 she co-founded the Simone De Beauvoir audiovisual centre along with Carole Roussopoulos and Ioana Wieder. A final collaboration with Chantal Akerman, the innovative musical Golden Eighties (1986), allowed her to do what she couldn't do in "Peau d'âne" and give a very moving rendition of a beautiful song. Avant-garde German director Ulrike Ottinger provided Delphine with some unforgettable and appropriately weird roles in three of her features: multiple characters in Freak Orlando (1981), the only female incarnation of Dr.Mabuse in Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984) (opposite Veruschka von Lehndorff, playing the title role 'en travesti') and Lady Windermere in Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989). She gave a final, stunning TV performance in Une saison de feuilles (1989) as an actress suffering from Alzheimer's disease and won a 7 d'or (a French Emmy) for it. Her mature turn as a woman who's reaching the end of the line looks particularly poignant now, as it has the bitter taste of a tear-eyed farewell. A woman of extraordinary courage, Delphine had been secretly battling lung cancer (she had always been a chain smoker) for a few years, but, because of her supreme professionalism, she had never neglected a work commitment because of that. Only her closest friends knew. It became evident that there was no hope left when, in September 1990, she had do withdraw her participation from a production of Peter Shaffer's "Lettice and Lovage" with Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud's theatre company. One month later she tragically lost her battle with cancer and died in hospital, leaving an unbridgeable void in the acting world and in the lives of many. Tributes flew in torrents, with Jean-Claude Brialy hosting a particularly touching memorial where Jeanne Moreau read some very heartfelt phrases come from the pen of Marguerite Duras to honour the memory of her muse. In the decade following Delphine's death, many of her features unfortunately didn't prove to have much staying power -being so unique and destined to a very selected and elitist audience- and plenty of people began to forget about the actress. Delphine's good friend, director Jacqueline Veuve, thought this unacceptable and she saw to do something about it, shooting a documentary called Delphine Seyrig, portrait d'une comète (2000), which premiered at Locarno film festival. This partially helped to renew the actress' cult and to expand it to several other followers. Similar retrospectives at the Modern Art Museum in New York and at the La Rochelle Film Festival hopefully served the same purpose as well. One can also hope that the French Academy (Académie des arts et techniques du cinéma) would start to make amends for past sins by awarding Delphine a posthumous César: since the immortal Jean Gabin received one in 1987, who could possibly make a likelier pair with him?- Actress
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Juliette Binoche was born in Paris, France, to Monique Yvette Stalens, a director, teacher, and actress, and Jean-Marie Binoche, a sculptor, director, and actor. Her mother was born in Czestochowa, Poland, of French, Walloon Belgian, and Polish descent, while her father is French. Juliette was only 23 when she first attracted the attention of international film critics with The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times film critic with an international following of his books on film and TV reviews, wrote that she was "almost ethereal in her beauty and innocence". That innocence was gone by the time Binoche completed Louis Malle's Damage (1992) (aka "Fatale"). In an interview after the film was released, Binoche said: "Malle was trying direct and wanted something more sophisticated". A year later, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue (1993) was added to her film credits. After a sabbatical from film-making to become a mother in 1994, Binoche was selected as the heroine of France's most expensive ($35 million) movie ever: The Horseman on the Roof (1995). More recently, she has made The English Patient (1996), for which she won an Oscar for 'Best supporting actress' and Chocolat (2000).- Actress
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Academy Award-winning actress Marion Cotillard was born on September 30, 1975 in Paris. Cotillard is the daughter of Jean-Claude Cotillard, an actor, playwright and director, and Niseema Theillaud, an actress and drama teacher. Her father's family is from Brittany.
Raised in Orléans, France, she made her acting debut as a child with a role in one of her father's plays. She studied drama at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique in Orléans. After small appearances and performances in theater, Cotillard had occasional and minor roles in TV series such as Highlander (1992) and Extrême limite (1994), but her career as a film actress began in the mid-1990s. While still a teenager, Cotillard made her cinema debut at the age of 18 in the film L'histoire du garçon qui voulait qu'on l'embrasse (1994), and had small but noticeable roles in films such as Arnaud Desplechin's My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (1996) and Coline Serreau's comedy The Green Planet (1996).
In 1996, she had her first lead role in the TV film Chloé (1996), playing the title role - a teenage runaway who is forced into prostitution. Cotillard co-starred opposite Anna Karina, the muse of the Nouvelle Vague.
In 1997, she won her first film award at the Festival Rencontres Cinématographiques d'Istres in France, for her performance as the young imprisoned Nathalie in the short film Affaire classée (1997). Her first prominent screen role was Lilly Bertineau in Gérard Pirès's box-office hit Taxi (1998), a role which she reprised in two sequels: Taxi 2 (2000) and Taxi 3 (2003), this role earned her first César award nomination (France's equivalent to the Oscar) for Most Promising Actress in 1999.
In 1999, Cotillard starred as Julie Bonzon in the Swiss war drama War in the Highlands (1998). For her performance in the film, she won the Best Actress award at the Autrans Film Festival in France. In 2001, Marion starred in Pretty Things (2001) as the twin sisters Marie and Lucie, and was nominated for her second César award for Most Promising Actress.
Cotillard's breakthrough in France came in 2003, when she starred in Yann Samuell's dark romantic comedy Love Me If You Dare (2003), in which she played Sophie Kowalsky, the daughter of Polish immigrants who lives a love-hate relationship with her childhood friend. The film was a box-office hit in France, became a cult film abroad and led Cotillard to bigger projects.
Her first Hollywood movie was Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003), in which she played Joséphine, the wife of William Bloom (played by Billy Crudup). A few years later, Marion starred in Ridley Scott's A Good Year (2006) playing Fanny Chenal, a French café owner who falls in love with Russell Crowe's character. In 2004, she won the Chopard Thophy of Female Revelation at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2005, Cotillard won the César award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance of Tina Lombardi in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement (2004).
In 2007, Cotillard received international recognition for her iconic portrayal of Édith Piaf in La Vie En Rose (2007). Director Olivier Dahan cast Cotillard to play the legendary French singer because to him, her eyes were like those of "Piaf". The fact that she can sing also helped Cotillard land the role of "Piaf", although most of the singing in the film is that of Piaf's. The role won Cotillard the Academy Award for Best Actress along with a César, a Lumière Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Golden Globe. That made her only the second actress to win an acting Oscar performing in a language other than English next to Sophia Loren (Two Women (1960)). Only two male performers (Roberto Benigni for Life Is Beautiful (1997) and Robert De Niro for The Godfather Part II (1974)) have won an Oscar for solely non-English parts. Trevor Nunn called her portrayal of "Piaf" "one of the greatest performances on film ever". At the Berlin International Film Festival, where the film premiered, Cotillard was given a 15-minute standing ovation. When she won the César, Alain Delon presented the award and announced the winner as "La Môme Marion" (The Kid Marion), he also praised her at the stage saying: "Marion, I give you this César. I think this César is for a great great actress, and I know what I'm talking about".
Cotillard has worked much more frequently in English-language movies following her Academy Award recognition. In 2009, she acted opposite Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's Public Enemies (2009), and later that year played Luisa Contini in Rob Marshall's musical Nine (2009) and received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. Time magazine ranked her as the fifth best performance by a female in 2009. The following year, she took on the main antagonist role, Mal, in Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), and in 2011 she had memorable parts in Midnight in Paris (2011) and Contagion (2011) and reteamed with Christopher Nolan in The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
In 2011 and 2012 respectively, Cotillard appeared on the top of Le Figaro's list of the highest paid actors in France, it was the first time in nine years that a female topped the list. Cotillard was also the highest paid foreign actress in Hollywood.
In 2012, Cotillard received wide-spread critical acclaim for her role as the legless orca trainer Stéphanie in Rust and Bone (2012). The film was a box office hit in France and received a ten-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Cotillard won the Globe de Cristal (France's equivalent to the Golden Globe), the Étoile d'Or award and was nominated for the Golden Globes, SAG, BAFTA, Critics' Choice and César Awards for her performance in the film. Cate Blanchett wrote an op-ed for Variety praising Cotillard's performance in "Rust and Bone", the two actresses competed for the Academy Awards for Best Actress in 2008, Cate was nominated for her performance in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and Marion for her performance in La Vie En Rose (2007) and Cotillard won the Oscar.
She had her first leading role in an American movie in 2013, in James Gray's The Immigrant (2013), in which she played Ewa Cybulska, a Polish immigrant who wants to experience the American dream. Cotillard received wide-spread acclaim for her performance in the film at the 66th Cannes Film Festival, where the film premiered, and also won several critics awards. In 2014, Cotillard played Sandra in the Belgian film Two Days, One Night (2014) by the Dardenne brothers. Her performance was unanimously praised at the 67th Cannes Film Festival, earned several critics awards, Cotillard won her first European Award for Best Actress and also received her second Oscar nomination and her sixth César award nomination.
In 2015, she played Lady Macbeth opposite Michael Fassbender in Justin Kurzel's Macbeth (2015) and voiced two animated movies: The Little Prince (2015) in which she voiced The Rose, and April and the Extraordinary World (2015), in which she voiced the lead role, Avril. Her 2016 included Nicole Garcia's From the Land of the Moon (2016), Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World (2016), Justin Kurzel's Assassin's Creed (2016), in which she worked again with her Macbeth co-star Michael Fassbender; and Robert Zemeckis's Allied (2016), with Brad Pitt.- Actress
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Vanessa Paradis is a renowned French actress, model and singer born in 1972. She started her career as a model and singer before becoming a movie star. Her song "Joe Le Taxi" brought her success in 15 countries at the age of 14. Later, in 1990, she was awarded a 'César' (French equivalent of Oscar) for her debut movie White Wedding (1989). For the next 5 years, she concentrated on her musical career, she rejected Pedro Almodóvar and John Boorman. In 1995, she appeared in Élisa (1995), but decided to concentrate on her private life with Johnny Depp and their children. After several years, Vanessa continued her singing and acting career.- Actress
The daughter of actress Geneviève Sorya, in 1948 she played the part of Juliette in The Lovers of Verona (1949). During the 1950s and 1960s she made various films, including Montparnasse 19 (1958) and La Dolce Vita (1960), but only Lola (1961) , Jacques Demy, and A Man and a Woman (1966) Claude Lelouch saw major success. With the latter she had, but did not use, the chance to establish herself in America. Therefore she was only participating in second-row productions in Europe and America.- Actress
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Mireille Darc was born on 15 May 1938 in Toulon, Var, France. She was an actress and director, known for Weekend (1967), Galia (1966) and O.K. patron (1974). She was married to Pascal Desprez. She died on 28 August 2017 in Paris, France.- Actress
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Before Arlette-Leonie Bathiat went to the movies she was a secretary and had posed several times as a model for different painters and photographers. In 1920 she debuted on stage at a theatre. She only began to work in movies after 1930. After World War II she was condemned to prison for having been the lover of a German official during the ocupation of France. In 1963 she had an accident which left her almost blind. Her most important movies were filmed and directed by Marcel Carné ("Hotel du Nord (1938)" or "Enfants du Paradis, Les (1945)").- Actress
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Agnès Jaoui was born on 19 October 1964 in Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, France. She is an actress and writer, known for The Taste of Others (2000), Look at Me (2004) and Family Resemblances (1996). She was previously married to Jean-Pierre Bacri.- Actress
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Claudine Auger, a former Miss France 1st Runner-up (1958), received her dramatic training at the Paris Drama Conservatory and is best known to US / UK audiences as the stunning brunette "Domino" opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond thriller Thunderball (1965), She has kept fairly busy since her Bond days, acting in a number of Italian, French and Spanish films including The Bermuda Triangle (1978), Credo (1983), and La bocca (1991).- Actress
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Anne Parillaud was born in Paris, France on May 6, 1960 and even though all her travels took her to many lands, is still a Paris resident. Anne studied ballet in school, and her first appearance was in the film Un amour de sable (1977) where she played "La jeune fille avec un petit chat" ("The girl with a kitten"). However, her first real role was as "Estelle" in L'hôtel de la plage (1978) and, even though she had only appeared in this film during summer vacation, by then she had caught the show business bug. Anne was in eight other films, and then she gave her breakout performance in her signature role as "Nikita" in the wildly popular La Femme Nikita (1990), which spun off the American remake Point of No Return (1993) starring Bridget Fonda, and the USA Network television series La Femme Nikita (1997) starring Peta Wilson. Anne had taken judo lessons for three months to prepare for this part. Anne said that when acting, she can abandon herself; indeed the character Nikita is nothing like her. Anne hates guns and even said of Nikita: "For a while, she was in me like a demon".
When it comes to which films and directors to work with, Anne has her one rule: it must touch her heart. Obviously director Luc Besson touched her heart, they had a daughter together, but the couple separated shortly after La Femme Nikita (1990); (in 1997, Besson was briefly married to Milla Jovovich, but they divorced). Anne traveled to America to do several films, including Innocent Blood (1992), in which she plays a French vampire. She said of her character "Marie", that she wasn't born a vampire, didn't decide to be one; in that sense, the movie is a parable about dealing with the problem of being different in society. And difference equates to loneliness. Anne is still busy appearing in movies. Offscreen, Anne enjoys simple pleasures such as dancing, and talking with friends. And she is always led by her heart, Anne says she is someone who lives by impulse first. Her many fans would say it seems she has made a lot of right choices.- Actress
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Magali Noël was born on 27 June 1931 in Izmir, Turkey. She was an actress, known for Amarcord (1973), Rififi (1955) and Z (1969). She was married to Jean-Pierre Bernard. She died on 23 June 2015 in Châteauneuf-Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes, France.- Actress
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Mathilda May (born Karin Haïm) is a French actress and dancer from Paris. She is primarily known to English-speaking audiences for playing the alien vampire Space Girl, the main villain of the cult horror film "Lifeforce" (1985). The role required her to appear naked for most of the film, though her character remained mysterious and menacing. In France, May's breakthrough role was that of Juliette, the suicidal young woman whose love life was at the center of the psychological thriller "The Cry of the Owl" (1987). For this role, May won the "César Award for Most Promising Actress".
In 1965, May was born in Paris. Her father was the playwright Victor Haïm (1935-) . Her paternal ancestors were Sephardic Jews from the city of Thessaloniki in Greek Macedonia. May's mother was the Swedish ballet teacher and choreographer Margareta Hanson. May herself was trained as a dancer in early life. In 1981, May won the "Premier Prix du Conservatoire de Danse de Paris" (First Prize of the Paris Dance Conservatory). At the time, she was only 16-years-old.
May pursued an acting career in the early 1980s. She made her film debut in the fantasy film "Nemo" (1984), where a boy from New York City is transported to an alternate reality. She became known to international audience with "Lifeforce" (1985), and had some success in France during the late 1980s. Following "The Cry of the Owl", May played the romantic lead in the controversial musical "Three Seats for the 26th" (1988). In the film, an aging actor falls in love with Marion de Lambert (played by May), the daughter of his former lover. He is relatively unfazed when he learns that his new love interest is his own illegitimate daughter.
May's first significant film in the 1990s was the biographical drama "Isabelle Eberhardt" (1991), where she had the lead role. May played the Swiss author and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877 - 1904), and also portrayed Eberhardt''s accidental death in a flash flood. The film was nominated for three AACTA Awards, without ever winning. The film was negatively received by critics for overemphasizing Eberhardt's femininity and sexuality, while mostly ignoring the political context of her activities in North Africa, and her status as a social outcast.
That same year, May played the female lead in the erotic drama "Naked Tango". The film depicted the life of an Eastern European young woman who was forced into prostitution in 1920s Buenos Aires. The film was largely inspired by the activities of the Zwi Migdal (1867-1939), an international sex trafficking organization which controlled about 2,000 brothels in Argentina during the interwar period.
May also had the lead role in "Becoming Colette" (1991). The film dramatized the early life of the actress, journalist, and novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954). The real Colette is primarily remembered for her vivid depictions of the French demimonde of elite courtesans, and for her lesbian affairs with the fellow writer Natalie Clifford Barney and the aristocratic artist Mathilde de Morny.
May next had the female lead role in the crime drama "Toutes peines confondues" (1992). She played Jeanne Gardella, the wife of a shady businessman. She genuinely loves her husband, but fails to inform him that she is an Interpol agent who was assigned to spy on him. The film was an adaptation of a novel by Andrew Coburn (1932-2018).
May had the female lead in the romantic comedy "The Tit and the Moon" (1994), playing the beautiful French dancer Estrellita. In the film a preadolescent boy is fascinated with Estrellita and her breasts, but finds himself competing for her attention with Estrellita's husband and with an adolescent singer.
In 1996,. May had her first role in a video game, cast in the space flight simulation "Privateer 2: The Darkening". The main plot featured an amnesiac man who chose a new life as a privateer, while trying to find out why there was no record of his past life. The game was introduced as a spin-off of the space combat series "Wing Commander" (1990-2007), but had little resemblance to its predecessors.
May had her final major role in the 1990s in the action thriller film "The Jackal" (1997). She played Isabella Celia Zancona, a retired member of the Basque terrorist organization ETA. Zancona becomes a key witness for the FBI, as she is thought to be the only person able to identify the wanted assassin "The Jackal" (played by Bruce Willis). The assassin is an old foe of Zancona, who wounded her during a past encounter and caused her to miscarry their unborn child. She agrees to help, partly because she is promised safe haven, and partly because she wants revenge. The film was a minor box office hit.
During the early 2000s, May regularly appeared in television films and television series. Her theatrical roles were few in this period. She was eventually cast in a supporting role in the comedy thriller "A Girl Cut in Two" (2007). The film depicts a love triangle which results in the murder of one suitor by the other one. May's next significant film role was in the anthology film "The Players" (2012), which depicted various tales of male infidelity. The film attracted controversy for the sexually suggestive posters of its release, which were seen as violating France's regulations for advertising.
May continued regularly appearing in television roles throughout the 2010s, and was part of the main cast in the television series "Access" She resumed playing in theatrical films in 2019, initially cast in the World War II-themed drama "An Irrepressible Woman". By 2022, May was 57-years-old. She has never retired, and remains a well-known face in the European film market.- Actress
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The French actress Ludivine Sagnier was born on July 3, 1979 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, in France's Yvelines department. Ludivine studied acting as a young girl and had made her movie debut at the age 10 in Les maris, les femmes, les amants (1989). She has established her reputation as one of the brightest young stars in French and international cinema in her collaborations with French filmmaker François Ozon, starting with Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) (based on a screenplay by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 8 Women (2002) and in Swimming Pool (2003). For her performance in 8 Women (2002), she won a Cesar Award nomination (the French equivalent of the Oscar) and the Romy Schneider Award that is given each year to a promising young French actress. In that film, Sagnier proved her acting prowess by distinguishing herself in a stellar cast that included the legendary actresses Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert as well as Emmanuelle Béart and Fanny Ardant. Along with these grand ladies of the French cinema, Sagnier won the Best Actress Award from the European Film Academy Award and the Silver Bear Award at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival.
Swimming Pool (2003) represented her crossover into English-language cinema. (Sagnier played her first English language role in Toothache (2006).) Marketed in the U.S. with a comely shot of Sagnier sunbathing alongside a pool, Ozon's film became one of the biggest-grossing foreign movies in the U.S. during 2003. So far, she has turned down large monetary offers to appear in American films as the foreign girlfriend of young American superstars, as she remains committed to French cinema.
Sagnier became a mother on March 25, 2005, when she gave birth to a daughter named Bonnie by her boyfriend, French actor Nicolas Duvauchelle.- Actress
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Charlotte Gainsbourg was born in London, England in 1971. She is an Anglo-French actress and singer. The daughter of English singer and actress Jane Birkin and French songwriter, singer and actor Serge Gainsbourg, she was raised in Paris. Charlotte made her motion picture debut in 1984. In 1986, Charlotte won a César Award for "Most Promising Actress", and, in 2000, she won "Best Supporting Actress" for the film The Log (1999). In 1993, Charlotte made her English speaking debut in The Cement Garden (1993), written and directed by her uncle, Andrew Birkin. She made her stage debut in 1994 in David Mamet's Oleanna at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse. In 1996, Charlotte starred as the title character in Jane Eyre (1996), a film adaption of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel. In 2006, Charlotte appeared alongside Gael García Bernal in Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep (2006). In 2007, she appeared as Claire in the Todd Haynes directed Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There (2007), also contributing a cover of the Dylan song "Just Like a Woman" to the film soundtrack. In 2009, she won the award for Best Actress at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for the film Antichrist (2009). Charlotte starred in the French/Australian production, The Tree (2010), released in 2010, and in Lars von Trier's science fiction disaster film, Melancholia (2011).- Audrey Fleurot was born on 6 July 1977 in Mantes-la-Jolie, Yvelines, France. She is an actress, known for The Intouchables (2011), Spiral (2005) and Un village français (2009).
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Pauline Lafont was born on 6 April 1963 in Nîmes, Gard, France. She was an actress, known for Soccer Heroes (1987), Le petit docteur (1986) and Cop Au Vin (1985). She died on 11 August 1988 in Gabriac, Lozère, France.- Actress
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For Michèle Mercier, the role of Angélique, "the Marquise of the Angels," was both a blessing and a curse. It catapulted her to almost instant stardom, rivaling Brigitte Bardot in her celebrity and popularity, but ruined her acting career. The character of Angélique made to forget the other aspects of the career of Mercier, but it is true that general public discovered her only in "Angélique," and made her a real star of the French cinema of that time. By the end of the 1960s, the names Angélique and Michèle Mercier were synonymous, and to escape type-casting, Mercier was compelled to leave France and try to re-start her career in United States, unfortunately without any success.
Daughter of Nice's pharmacists, born on January 1, 1939 and named as Jocelyne Yvonne Renée, she initially wanted to be a dancer. Wartime, no money to buy food, but little Jocelyne wept all week, cadging father, well-known pharmacist in Nice, to buy her ballet skirts and points. In return she promised to work in drug-store. Father took this only as childish whim. But little girl got her wish through: of "small ballet-rat," as they call little dancers, who participate in stage shows, she grew up to soloist in Opera of Nice. Then came Paris. First she was engaged to the troupe of Roland Petit, then she danced in the company of the "Ballets of the Eiffel tower." At 15, she met Maurice Chevalier, who predicted her success and glory. They did arrive, but by another way that the dance. Parallel to her career as dancer, Jocelyne followed courses of dramatic art in the class of Solange Sicard. Her debut in French cinema was for Mercier another compromise: her birth name seemed too long and too old-fashioned for movie credits. What, if she'll take a name Michèle? She winced - this was name of her little sister, who died at the age of five by the fever typhoid, but she agreed. And it was also as in testimony of admiration for her partner Michèle Morgan, as she borrowed her name to her. After some romantic comedies and a small role in François Truffaut's "Shoot the pianist" (1960; her favorite role), she approaches the Sixties mainly in the cinema of district. She also worked in England and made then mainly small-budget films in Italy, always in the same register of easy girl. To this moment Michèle already competed with Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, continuously shooting in Italy. She needed a role, which could make her a star. Only in 1963, when was decided to make movie by sensational novel "Angélique," Michèle got this kind of chance.
Many actresses were approached to play the role of Angélique. The Producer Francis Cosne absolutely wanted Brigitte Bardot for the part. She refused, but later judged Michèle Mercier to be fantastic in it. Annette Stroyberg was considered next, but judged not to be sufficiently well-known. Catherine Deneuve was too pale, Jane Fonda spoke French with an American accent, and Virna Lisi was busy in Hollywood. The most serious actress considered was Marina Vlady. She almost sign a contract, but Michèle Mercier won the role after trying out for it - which she did not appreciate very much since she was being treated like a beginner while she was already a big star in Italy. At the time she was contacted to play Angélique, she had already acted in over twenty movies. During four years she made five Angélique-movies, enjoying the real success. Nevertheless the moment came, when she finally wanted to interrupt with this aggravating character. Michèle played with Jean Gabin in "The Thunder of God" of Denys de la Patellière. Then with Robert Hossein in "La second vérité" of Christian-Jaque... But the time has gone. That was also confirmed by Mercier's flop in Hollywood... What life didn't taught her, that's the skill how to dominate men. Every time Michèle captivated regardlessly. She was deceived, betrayed. She suffered. "Men in their way, shattered my life. What I wanted from them? Real, mutual love. What they wanted - no hard to guess," candidly confessed Michèle after sensational story with a shah, who overwhelmed actress with diamonds and bouquets of flowers, and then tryed to rape her. Press enjoyed Michèle's love affairs and divorces. For some reason or other, in real life this beautiful and kind woman met only rascals, without exception. First husband turned out to be alcoholic. With well known racer Claude Bourillot she lived together 12 years. And she was shocked, when in one day she found out that he vanished with her jewels. Full of dramatism was story of her romance with Italian prince N., who after many years of courtship got intimate with Michèle and at the end betrayed her, refusing to marry her. Incidentally, all these failures even more hardened the character of Michèle Mercier. After a very long eclipse, she decided to return to the cinema. In 1998, the actress made in Cuba and in Italy "La Rumbera," a feature film by Italian director Piero Vivarelli. In 1999, swindled of several million francs in a business venture, Mercier had serious financial problems. She even planned to sell famous wedding gown of the Marquise of the Angels. The actress confessed in Nice Matin: "I am ruined, I'll be obliged to sell part of my paintings, my furnitures, my properties, my jewels and the costumes of Angélique." In 2002, she presented at the Cannes Film Festival her second book of memories in which she affirms in the cover that "she's not Angélique!," entrusting her irritation to be summarized to this glamour-image of the Sixties. In this book Mercier also tells about how Italian actor Vittorio Gassman tried to take her by force, but remembers also the gentility of Marcello Mastroianni and the suppers of Bettino Craxi, former Prime Minister, and Silvio Berlusconi. In the end she admits: "All the men who have made the court of me, tried to seduce Angélique... not me. But then one day I understood that Angelique could not make more harm to me, therefore I have learned to consider she's like a little sister, with whom I had to live hand in hand."- Actress
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Françoise Fabian was born on 10 May 1933 in Algiers, Alger, France [now Algeria]. She is an actress and writer, known for My Night at Maud's (1969), Belle de Jour (1967) and Me, Myself and Mum (2013). She was previously married to Marcel Bozzuffi and Jacques Becker.- Actress
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Hafsia Herzi , born in Manosque, is a French actress and director. She grew up in Marseille.
Hafsia Herzi, of Tunisian origin by her father and Algerian by her mother, is the youngest of a family of four children (two brothers and a sister, Dalila).
In 2019, she released her first feature film as a director, You deserve a love , followed by Bonne Mère two years later.
Hafsia Herzi was only 13 years old when she landed a role, albeit a minor one, in Notes sur le rire, a TV movie for France 3 adapted from the novel by Marcel Pagnol. She followed this up with a few extra roles, and auditioned for the series Plus belle la vie and Sous le soleil; trials at the end of which she was not selected.
It was in 2005 that her luck changed for the young actress: her meeting with Abdellatif Kechiche proved decisive, as he offered her the lead role in La Graine et le mulet, in which she brilliantly and sincerely played the character of Rym. A first try, a master stroke: Hafsia Herzi won the Marcello Mastroianni Prize at the 64th Venice Film Festival in 2007, and the César for the Best Female Hopeful (meilleur espoir féminin) in early 2008.
Having never taken acting classes, she left Marseille and moved to Paris, where she enrolled in law at the university, took acting classes at the conservatory and even took diction classes to soften her Mediterranean accent. She decided to devote herself exclusively to the cinema, and quickly obtained the main roles in Française and L'Aube du monde, for which she learned Iraqi. In 2009, she plays under the direction of Francis Huster in Un homme et son chien, alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo before sharing the star with Jacques Dutronc for the fourth film of Xavier De Choudens: Joseph et la fille.
The year 2011 seems to be the year of consecration for the young actress because we find it in the poster of four films and not least: Jimmy Rivière's Teddy Lussi-Modeste, Le Chat du rabbin where she lends himself to the exercise of dubbing, L' Apollonide - souvenirs de la maison - close de Bertrand Bonello et La Source des femmes by Radu Mihaileanu, alongside the much sought after Leïla Bekhti. In Hiam Abbass' Héritage, the actress plays the rebellious Hajar, the youngest daughter of the Arab family at the center of the film.
More and more present on the screens, Hafsia Herzi multiplies projects and her roles gain importance, like her performances in Fugues marocaines, Le Sac de farine, Certifiée halal or Sex Doll. She also collaborates again with Abdellatif Kechiche on the two controversial Mektoub, my love. The actress also tastes the joys of the thriller via Persona non grata by Roschdy Zem, in which she gives the line to Nicolas Duvauchelle and Raphael Personnaz.
In 2019, the actress directs her first feature film, Tu mérites un amour, in which she also plays the lead role.- Actress
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Catherine Spaak was born on 3 April 1945 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France. She was an actress and writer, known for The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971), The Easy Life (1962) and The Empty Canvas (1963). She was married to Vladimiro Tuselli, Daniel Rey, Johnny Dorelli and Fabrizio Capucci. She died on 17 April 2022 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Actress
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Miou-Miou was born Sylvette Herry on February 22, 1950, in Paris, France. Her father was a gendarme, her mother was a sales-woman. Young Miou-Miou was selling strawberries helping out at her mother's fruit and vegetable stand at a street market. There she was spotted by actor-director Romain Bouteille, who invited her to work at Café de la Gare, a popular Parisian theatre, where Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere were principal actors. There she began as a cleaning lady, then became a dresser, then an actress. She was nicknamed Miou-Miou by Coluche because she was always nice, quiet, and clean as a kitty.
In 1971, Miou-Miou made her film debut in La vie sentimentale de Georges le tueur (1971) (The Sentimental Life of George Le Tueur 1971). At that time she became romantically involved with the fellow actor Patrick Dewaere. Their daughter, Angèle Herry-Leclerc, was born in 1974, but their relationship ended few years later, after their work in several films. Their relationship was portrayed in F... comme Fairbanks (1976), and later was documented in Patrick Dewaere (1992) (documentary).
Miou-Miou has been an unusual personality in the French cinema. She once refused to take the Cesar Award for Best Actress, which she won for the title role in Memoirs of a French Whore (1979). She explained that refusal citing her belief that artists should not compete against each other. Her career was hardly affected by such a gesture. She was nominated for Cesar nine times. Her better known works were made with Gérard Depardieu in Going Places (1974), Tell Her That I Love Her (1977), Ménage (1986), and Germinal (1993), an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Émile Zola.- Actress
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Marie-France first came to the fore as an actress of the Nouvelle Vague movement in the 1960's. She had spent her early childhood in French Indochina, where her father was employed as colonial governor, but the family moved to Paris when she was twelve. Just five years later, she was spotted by a casting director, who had been tasked by François Truffaut to discover a 'fresh and cheerful' new face for his 32-minute film Antoine and Colette (1962). While finding her feet in the acting profession, Marie-France attended Paris University, eventually attaining degrees in law and political science. By the time, Truffaut cast her again as Colette in the second of two sequels, Love on the Run (1979), she was involved in the writing process of the screenplay herself. Prior to that, she had also co-written the script for Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), in which she starred herself as an enigmatic governess.
In her private life, she held strong socio/political convictions, outspoken on women's rights and legal abortion, and taking part in student demonstrations in Paris in 1968. On screen, she displayed poise, style and femininity in abundance. She was often well cast as a seductive temptress or as women of mysterious background. She was excellent as Agathe in Surreal Estate (1976), and in the part that won her the prestigious Cesar and led to her brief sojourn in Hollywood as Karine in Cousin, Cousine (1975). Her experience in America did not prove a happy one, though she lent an undeniable touch of glamour to her roles as high fashion designers in the otherwise mediocre miniseries Scruples (1980) and (in the title role) of Chanel Solitaire (1981). More at home in the cinema of her native France, she had a few more worthy roles come her way, notably as Madame Verdurin in Marcel Proust's Time Regained (1999). She also directed two films, the first of which, Le bal du gouverneur (1990), was based on her own novel about childhood experiences in New Caledonia.
Marie-France died tragically as the result of accidental drowning at her villa at Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, near Toulon, at the age of 66.- Danièle Ciarlet, AKA Zouzou, has become one of the most revered - even though quite obscure for most - icons of the 60s Parisian scene. Discovered at age 16 by then young design artist Jean-Paul Goude, she briefly modeled for Yves Saint Laurent, and, as a tireless night-clubber, was better known, in the early 60s, under the nickname "Zouzou la twisteuse". Shortly after that, she got romantically involved with Rolling Stones member Brian Jones, whom she followed around the world. She was also a good friend of John Lennon and George Harrison and was photographed by Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, met Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and most of all, Jack Nicholson who remained, along with Marianne Faithfull, very... faithful friends. She also recorded two EPs as a singer at the end of the 60s, and a duet with Dani, another French 60s icon. After a few roles in underground and experimental French films (under the direction of Philippe Garrel or Yves Lagrange), she got a cinematographic breakthrough in 1972 with Eric Rohmer's L'amour l'après-midi, and developed an international career as an actress, a career which unfortunately, and progressively, slowed down because of her addiction to heroin. She spent seven years on the Cariibean Island of Saint Barthélémy to shape up, but her return to Paris, in the mid-80s, was followed by two jail incarcerations due to mild drug dealings. In the mid-90s, drug free at last, she got a fresh start solding the newspapers "La rue" and "Le réverbère" (the equivalent of British "The Big Issue") in the Parisian metro. In November 2003, the autobiography "Zouzou jusqu'à l'aube" ("Zouzou until Dawn") was released, in which she recounted with utmost honesty the extreme ups and downs of her incredible life. A compilation of all her songs was also released, and a documentary, "Zouzou l'héroïne", told in images the fate of probably one of the most beautiful woman of the world, revered as the "female Marlon Brando" when she burst into the Parisian scene.
- A classic beauty, blonde French actress Michèle Morgan was one of her country's most popular leading ladies for over five decades. Born Simone Renee Roussel on Leap Year Day (February 29) in 1920, she ran away from home as a teenager and studied acting under René Simon, beginning her film career at 16 working as a film extra to pay for drama classes.
The young actress soon caught the eye of director Marc Allégret, who cast her in Heart of Paris (1937), which clinched her stardom. Her remote, enigmatic features and gloomy allure had audiences comparing her to a young Greta Garbo. She went on to appear elegantly opposite Charles Boyer in the drama Orage (1938) directed by Allegret; opposite Jean Gabin in Moth and the Flame (1938) directed by Marcel Carné, as well as both Coral Reefs (1939) and Remorques (1941). She had her first top-billed roles in L'entraîneuse (1939) and La loi du nord (1939).
Michèle's eventual fled war-torn France for Hollywood and earned roles based purely on her European prestige. She did not stand out among the other female foreign imports of that time, however, such as Ingrid Bergman. Cast in rather routine sultry roles amid WWII surroundings, she received only a modest reception for such US-based films as Joan of Paris (1942) with Paul Henreid; Two Tickets to London (1943) with Alan Curtis; Passage to Marseille (1944) opposite Humphrey Bogart; and the noirish The Chase (1946) starring Robert Cummings.
Michèle succeeded much better at home continuing prolifically in such films as The Proud and the Beautiful (1953), The Moment of Truth (1952), Oasis (1955), The Grand Maneuver (1955), Shadow of the Guillotine (1956) (as Marie Antoinette), Grand Hotel (1959), Bluebeard (1963), Web of Fear (1964), The Diary of an Innocent Boy (1968) and Cat and Mouse (1975). Back in the late 1940's, she received the very first Cannes Film Festival award for "best actress" for her touching performance as the blind heroine in Pastoral Symphony (1946). She also received an honorary Cesar Award in 1992.
Married during the war and early post-war years (1942-1949) to American actor/singer William Marshall, Michèle's second husband was handsome Gallic star Henri Vidal and they appeared together in a couple of films, including both the historical drama Fabiola (1949) and romantic drama La belle que voilà (1950), plus The Seven Deadly Sins (1952) (albeit different "sin" segments) and Napoleon (1955). Following Vidal's sudden death of a heart at age 40 in 1959, the actress married a third time one year later to well-known French actor/writer/director Gérard Oury. They had unbilled cameos in A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later (1986). She was left a widow in 2006.
Semi-retired by the 1970's, Michèle's last feature film was a small bit in the Marcello Mastroianni film Everybody's Fine (1990). She retired in 1999 after a few sporadic 90's TV parts. She died in her home town of Hauts-de-Seine, France on December 20, 2016, at age 96. - Renee Adoree was born Jeanne de la Fontein in Lille in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, on September 30, 1898. She had what one could call a normal childhood. Her background is, perhaps, one of the most difficult to find information on any actress in existence. What we do know that her interest in acting surfaced during her teen years with minor stage productions in France. By 1920 she had attracted the attention of American producers and came to New York. Her first film before US audiences was The Strongest (1920) that same year. That was to be it until 1921,, when she appeared in Made in Heaven (1921). Renee wondered if she had made the right move by going into motion pictures because of two minor roles in as many films. Finally MGM saw fit to put her in more films in 1922. Movies such as West of Chicago (1922), Day Dreams (1922), Mixed Faces (1922) and Monte Cristo (1922) saw her with meatier roles than she had had previously. Renee was, finally, hitting her stride. Better roles to be sure, but still she was not of first-class caliber yet.
All that changed in 1925 when she starred as Melisande with John Gilbert in The Big Parade (1925). The picture made stars out of Renee, Gilbert and Karl Dane. Based on the film's success, Renee was put in another production, Excuse Me (1925). It lacked the drama the previous picture but was well-received. In a plot written by Elinor Glyn, Renee starred as Suzette in Man and Maid (1925). This was Renee's most provocative role yet and she was fast becoming one of the sexiest actresses on the screen. In 1927 Renee starred as Nang Ping in Mr. Wu (1927), along with her sister Mira Adoree. The film was a hit, with co-stars Ralph Forbes and Lon Chaney, but it was Renee's character that carried the film. After several more pictures, her career was slowing down. She appeared in a bit part in Show People (1928) later that year. The following year she had an uncredited bit role in His Glorious Night (1929). Re-discovered by First National Pictures after being released by MGM, she appeared in The Spieler (1928), in which she was a struggling carnival manager trying to overcome the dishonesty that went on in her organization.
Ill with tuberculosis, she retired in 1930. Less than a week after her 35th birthday, on Oct. 5, 1933, Renee Adoree died in Tujunga, CA. - Actress
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Lila Kedrova was a Russian actress, who spend most of her career as an expatriate. For her role as widowed courtesan Madame Hortense in Zorba the Greek (1964), Kedrova won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was the first Russian actress to win the award, and this was her only Academy Award nomination.
Kedrova was born in Petrogad, Russia (modern Saint Petersburg). She claimed to have been born in 1918, but she may have older by several years. She wanted to appear younger than she was. Her father was opera singer and liturgical music composer Nikolay Kedrov Sr. (1871-1940). Her mother was opera singer Sofia Gladkaya (1875-1975) was a singer at the Mariinsky Theatre and a teacher at the Conservatoire de Paris. Kedrova's older brother was composer Nikolay Kedrov Jr. (c. 1904-1981). Her sister, Irene Kedroff (real name: Irina Nikolayevna Kedrova) was a soprano.
The Kedrov family left the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic c. 1922, before the formation of the Soviet Union. They settled in Berlin , in the Weimar Republic. In 1928, the family moved to France (during the Third French Republic), where her parents were able to find better jobs.
Kedrova made her theatrical debut in 1932, appearing with the Moscow Art Theatre touring company, the foremost state-supported theatre of the Soviet Union. She made her film debut in the World War I-themed historical drama Ultimatum (1938). She appeared exclusively in French theatre and film until 1964. "Zorba the Greek" was her first appearance in an English-language film.
Kedrova's next notable role was that of Polish noblewoman Countess Kuchinska in the political thriller Torn Curtain (1966). She found some success in American theatre, playing Fraulein Schneider in the West End stage production of "Cabaret" (1968). She shared the stage with Judi Dench.
Kedrova appeared in Hollywood films for several years, mostly typecast in the role of an either eccentric or outright insane woman. Her last film appearance was a maternal role in the international co-production La prossima volta il fuoco (1993). She retired from acting as she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
In February 2000, Kedrova died in her residence in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, The cause of death was pneumonia. She was cremated, and her ashes were buried in the Kedrov family grave at the Russian cemetery in Paris.- An only child, Emmanuelle was born Paulette Germaine Riva in Cheniménil, but eventually grew up in Remiremont. Her mother, Jeanne Fernande Nourdin, was a seamstress. Her father, René Alfred "Alfredo" Riva, was a sign writer. Her paternal grandfather was Italian. She dreamed of becoming an actress since she was six, so that the entire world would take notice of her. This ambition was, however, to be met with firm opposition from her own family. Emmanuelle's father, a strict disciplinarian to whom the word "actress" was basically a synonym for "prostitute", disapproved of her way of thinking, since it clashed with the simple values he wished to pass on to her. Emmanuelle felt great affection towards her parents, but, at the same time, was under the impression that they couldn't really understand what she wanted. A bit of a tomboy and a rebel in her schooldays, she showed little interest in studying, but always directed her passion towards acting, appearing in every year-end play. In her early 20's, Emmanuelle was to find out the true meaning of nervous depression. Having completed the seamstress apprenticeship she had started at age 15, she eventually resigned herself to take up this profession, also discouraged by the thought that, in a city like Remiremont, the only possible alternative was to become a hairdresser. The sense of boredom that was weighing her down actually got so devouring that sewing sort of became the only form of escape from the horror of her everyday reality. But luckily, things were soon to change for the better. The day Emmanuelle discovered the announcement of a contest at the Dramatic Arts Centre of Rue Blanche was the day she found the courage to stand up to her parents and state that she would have traveled to Paris to become an actress. Having finally understood the depth of her sadness, her family couldn't oppose her wishes any longer, so, on the 13th May of 1953, she arrived in Paris.
At the Rue Blanche contest, Emmanuelle auditioned in front of one of the leading actors and directors of the Comédie-Française, the great Jean Meyer. She acted one scene from "On ne badine pas avec l'Amour" by Alfred de Musset. Meyer and the other acting teachers in the jury were just mesmerized by her performance and immediately realized that they had found the next big thing. It goes without saying that Emmanuelle was awarded a scholarship and Meyer himself decided to take her as his own pupil. At 26, Riva was too old to enter the French National Academy of Dramatic Arts, but she soon got her big break anyway, since French stage pillar René Dupuy cast her in a production of George Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man". Her next theatrical credits were "Mrs.Warren's Profession" (Shaw), "L'espoir" (Henri Bernstein), "Le dialogue des Carmélites" (Georges Bernanos), Britannicus (Jean Racine), "Il seduttore" (Diego Fabbri). Emmanuelle's small screen debut was in a 1957 episode of the history program Énigmes de l'histoire (1956), "Le Chevalier d'Éon". In the program, she played the Queen of England opposite Marcelle Ranson-Hervé as the cross-dressing knight in the service of the French crown. 1958, on the other hand, was the year that saw her first film appearance, an uncredited role in the Jean Gabin movie The Possessors (1958). The following year would, however, mark a turning point in her career. Emmanuelle was starring in the Dominique Rolin play "L'Epouvantail" at the "théatre de L'Oeuvre" in Paris when one night she found a visitor in her dressing room. His name was Alain Resnais and he was a young director responsible for a few shorts and documentaries (including the Holocaust-themed masterpiece Night and Fog (1956)). He was apparently looking for the female lead of his first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), based on a script by the great author, Marguerite Duras. Having seen a picture of Riva in a playbill of the production she was starring in, Resnais had immediately urged to see her. Without promising her anything, the director just asked Emmanuelle if he could take a few photos of her, so that he would have later shown them to Duras for a response. In addition to this, he also invited her at his place where he filmed her reciting some lines from "Arms and the Man". When he brought Duras the material, the author set her eyes on Emmanuelle's melancholic, enigmatic expression and immediately realized that they had found the one they were looking for. "Hiroshima Mon Amour" turned out to be one of the most acclaimed and representative movies of the French New Wave and launched both Resnais and Riva's careers in full orbit. Being somehow familiar with a sense of captivity, Emmanuelle gave an incredibly personal and involving performance as the unnamed heroine of the movie, and it was one that came straight from her heart. Playing an actress from Nevers who develops a love affection towards a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) while filming an anti-war movie in Hiroshima, Emmanuelle helped modernizing acting and female figures in film through an intimate, almost minimalistic woman portrayal that was quite unlike anything else that had been seen on the silver screen to that moment. Speaking her character's thoughts through a great deal of voice-over that could give the viewer constant access to her mind (making for an unusual amount of psychological introspection) , she was able to masterfully translate every last one of these feelings to subtle facial expressions whose richness and eloquence made her face the mirror of the compex soul she was baring before the camera. Combining this heartfelt approach with a refined diction that could perfectly deliver Duras' deep, existentialist lines of dialogue, she gave the world a new type of heroine who, while set apart by a distinctive intellectual charm, remained very humanly relatable. This ground-breaking acting was greatly praised by the critics of the time who were most open to innovation, including some that later became masters of revolutionary cinema themselves. Jean-Luc Godard stated: "Let's take the character played by Emmanuelle Riva. If you ran into her on the street, or saw her every day, I think she would only be of interest to a very limited number of people. But in the film she interests everyone. For me, she's the kind of girl who works at the "Editions du Seuil" or for "L'Express", a kind of 1959 George Sand. A priori, she doesn't interest me, because I prefer the kind of girl you see in [Renato] Castellani's film. This said, Resnais has directed Emmanuelle Riva in such a prodigious way that now I want to read books from "Le Seuil" or "L'Express"." This was Éric Rohmer's take on Riva's 'Elle': " She isn't a classical heroine, at least not one that a certain classical cinema has habituated us to see, from David Griffith to 'Nicholas Ray'." Jacques Doniol-Valcroze summed her up this way: "She is unique. It's the first time that we've seen on the screen an adult woman with an interiority and a capacity for reasoning pushed to such a degree. Emmanuelle Riva is a modern adult woman because she is not an adult woman. She is, on the contrary, very childlike, guided by her impulses alone and not by her ideas." And Jean Domarchi commented that "In a sense, Hiroshima is a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva." The phenomenal intelligence and dramatic intensity of Emmanuelle's performance made "Elle" one of the most indelible characters in film history: however, while Duras' screenplay received an Oscar nomination, her star-making turn was sadly overlooked by the Academy. At least she won the "Étoile de Cristal" (the top film award in France between 1955 and 1975, given by the "Académie française" and later replaced by the César) for Best Actress for her work in the movie.
One year later, Emmanuelle was known as a major talent and, consequently, plenty of directors from different nationalities were knocking at her door. She followed her Hiroshima success with two acclaimed turns in Le huitième jour (1960) and Recours en grâce (1960). In addition to playing these leading roles for French cinema, a scene-stealing Riva was also seen as Simone Signoret's feisty friend in Antonio Pietrangeli's excellent Adua e le compagne (1960) and gave the standout performance in Gillo Pontecorvo's superb Kapo (1960) as a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp. Enter 1961: another year, another career highlight. Emmanuelle was cast opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Pierre Melville's ground-breaking (and shocking for its time) Léon Morin, Priest (1961). In the movie, Riva's Barny, an atheist widow, and Belmondo's Morin, a young and seductive priest, develop a deep, theological relationship with strong sexual implications. Melville cast Emmanuelle thinking that she possessed the kind of intellectual eroticism the character needed and decided to demean her appearance as much as possible by having her dressed in the plainest clothes, so that Barny's major appeal would have been the cultural vivacity shining through her beautiful facial features. Riva and Belmondo's performances turned out to be outstanding and the film, against all odds, ended up being a big success. Riva next appeared in Climats (1962), the first (and only) feature film of TV writer and director Stellio Lorenzi, the man behind celebrated history programs such as La caméra explore le temps (1957) and its immediate predecessor, "Énigmes de L'Histoire", where Emmanuelle had done her screen debut. Adapting André Maurois' novel, Lorenzi hired Emmanuelle seeing her great interpretative sensitivity as being close to the nature of the character she would have played in the movie, also starring Jean-Pierre Marielle and Marina Vlady. In the story, Marielle is torn between sacred and profane love, leaving Vlady's vain and frivolous Odile for Riva's kind and good-hearted Isabelle. The same year, Emmanuelle scored another huge personal triumph as the title heroine of Georges Franju's Therese (1962). Her performance as François Mauriac's ill-fated 20th century Emma Bovary was a true masterpiece of psychological introspection: she perfectly captured all the key traits of the character at once, making her vulnerability coexist with her spirit of rebellion and her desire for freedom go along with a strong sense of self-destruction. Emmanuelle's work in the movie won her enormous raves and a sacred, unanimous Volpi Cup at Venice Film Festival. For the rest of the 60's (her golden period), Emmanuelle kept playing leading roles in French and Italian movies alike and also kept expanding her work to the TV medium. She found excellent, showcasing roles both in Thomas the Impostor (1965) (where she was directed by Franju for the second and last time) and in the lovely comedy The Hours of Love (1963) where she enjoyed a very unusual kind of wedding to Ugo Tognazzi. The third segment of Io uccido, tu uccidi (1965) paired her for the first time with Jean-Louis Trintignant. In this story of "Amour Fou", Riva plays a woman willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to save Trintignant's character, a man undeserving of her affection. Some TV work the actress did in this decade deserves to be noted as well. She reprised the role of Thérèse Desqueyroux in La fin de la nuit (1966), a dark and crepuscular adaptation of the Mauriac novel of the same name. This sequel follows Thérèse as she relocates to Paris where she has nothing to do but waiting for death to come. The TV play La forêt noire (1968), a fictionalized retelling of the relationship between Brahms and the Schumanns, featured another remarkable Riva performance, and so did Caterina (1963), which saw her taking on the role of Caterina Cornaro.
Going into the 70's and 80's, it wasn't easy for Emmanuelle to keep replicating the impact of her early performances and, while she always played leading roles in her native France, the majority of her movies didn't have a great international resonance. Misguided productions like Fernando Arrabal's I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (1973) proved totally unworthy of her talent. Like her contemporaries Delphine Seyrig, Bernadette Lafont, Bulle Ogier and Edith Scob, she liked to pick alternative, anti-mainstream projects, stating that she had no interest in doing things that had already been done before. In this period, she declined countless roles because she found them too traditional and, as a direct consequence of this, most directors stopped making her any more offers. Between 1982 and 1983 she was served with another couple of meaty parts to sink her teeth into. The first was in Marco Bellocchio's The Eyes, the Mouth (1982) (an underrated sequel of sorts to Fists in the Pocket (1965)) as the mother of Lou Castel, here taking on the role of Giovanni, the actor who had supposedly played Alessandro in the classic movie. The second was in Philippe Garrel's poignant Liberté, la nuit (1984) where she was paired with the director's father, the glorious actor, Maurice Garrel. In the subsequent years, Emmanuelle always found work in respectable productions, with the great director occasionally calling her for a project of superior quality (like Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue (1993)) but the great roles seemed to be way behind her by now. In 2008, she had a nice cameo in A Man and His Dog (2008), a French remake of Umberto D. (1952) which reunited her with her "Léon Morin, prêtre" co-star, Jean-Paul Belmondo. Riva briefly appears in the movie as a gentle lady who meets Belmondo's character -not coincidentally- in a church. She was soon to enjoy, however, an incredible and unforeseen career renaissance.
In 2010, Emmanuelle was cast in Michael Haneke's latest movie, Amour (2012). The script managed as well to get Jean-Louis Trintignant out of retirement and frequent Haneke collaborator Isabelle Huppert also got on board for the ride. Haneke had written the script with precisely Trintignant in mind, but hadn't already thought of a specific actress to play the leading female role. The director had greatly admired Emmanuelle's performance in "Hiroshima Mon Amour", but wasn't much familiar with her subsequent work. Still, a recent photo of hers lead him to think that she would have been believable as Trintignant's wife and decided to audition her along with a few other actresses her age. It soon became obvious that she was the best choice in the world. The Austrian director's most recent masterpiece follows Georges (Trintignant) and Anne (Riva), a long time married couple whose life changes drastically when she suffers a stroke. An incredibly deep reflection about the two most important components of life, love and death, Haneke's heartbreaking movie took Cannes film festival by storm, making obvious from the day it was screened that no other film had the slightest possibility to win the Golden Palm. A fundamental part of "Amour"'s success were of course the immense central performances of its two leads. Jury president Nanni Moretti would have liked to give "Amour" the main festival prize along with top acting honors for its two veteran stars, but unfortunately a festival rule forbids to give any other major award to the Golden Palm winner. Moretti was displeased by this, but he still managed to find a way to recognize Trintignant and Riva's work. Although the Best Actor Award went to Mads Mikkelsen for The Hunt (2012) and the Best Actress Award was given to Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur for Beyond the Hills (2012), the Golden Palm which the director was awarded was given alongside a special mention to the film's leads for their indispensable work. All three were invited on the stage to make an acceptance speech: it was one of the highest honors a thespian could ever dream of. Although Haneke remains the only official recipient of the Palm, Riva and Trintignant were, in spirit, the big acting winners of the 65th edition of the prestigious film festival. But the love for "Amour" wasn't to end here. After it amazed the audience at Toronto film festival, it became clear that the film would have done this over and over while getting screened all around the globe. Further accolades for the movie came at the end of November, when it scored an impressive four wins at the European Film Awards (Picture, Director, Actor and Actress). In the following weeks, Emmanuelle also racked up a good share of critic awards in America, including wins from major groups such as the National Society of Film Critics. On Oscar nominations day, Emmanuelle's performance was recognized along with the movie, its director and its screenplay. Having traveled to New York to attend the 2013 National Board of Review awards (where Amour had been named "Best Foreign Language Film"), Emmanuelle was still there when, bright and early, her room neighbors' jubilation cheers told her that she had been nominated. In great humbleness, she stated that she didn't expect it because 'there's plenty of talented people everywhere'. Shortly after, she also added a BAFTA to her mantle. After her triumph, Culture and communication Minister Aurélie Filippetti complimented Emmanuelle on her charisma and on the quality of her performance and stated that she would have defended France's colors at the upcoming Oscars. Emmanuelle's next appointment was with an overdue first César. After receiving a well-deserved standing ovation, she made a very beautiful and moving speech, quoting Von Kleist and paying homage to Maurice Garrel. A couple of days later she attended the Oscars and eventually failed to win the award, but this couldn't change the fact that she had made history already. Having always been in possession of one of cinema's most expressive faces, being equally effective with her physical language and having displayed unsurpassable courage and honesty in portraying the deterioration of Anne's body and soul, Emmanuelle gave a performance that went beyond every linguistic barrier and strongly touched and affected everyone who saw it. Her stunning work is for the ages.
Having hit such a high note near the end of her film career, it seems only natural that Emmanuelle did the same thing on the Parisian stage shortly after, scoring a new triumph in Didier Bezace's production of Marguerite Duras' play "Savannah Bay", which marked her theatrical return after a 13 years absence. Acting a text of the celebrated author who had penned the movie which had simultaneously given her immediate fame and screen immortality was the most inspired way to bring her exceptional career to full circle. Duras had written the part (originally performed by Madeleine Renaud) on the condition that only an actress no longer in the spring of youth would have played it: disregarding this wish would have been a mistake, but it must be added that no other actress in the same age range and associated with the author could have been an equally perfect choice. Wearing that slightly absent look loaded with a mixture of vulnerability and melancholy that only she can do so effectively, the actress reached- for the few, privileged ones who witnessed this new achievement- some basically unmatchable levels of heartbreak, repeating several times the words 'mon amour' to such an involving and powerful effect no one else could have produced. The actress stated that she would have probably refused to ever return to the stage hadn't she been offered this part. And her choice was, once again, a winning one. Emmanuelle kept working regularly for the next two years-- shooting films and doing poetry recitals all around Europe-- until she died on the 27 January 2017 after a secret battle with cancer. As profoundly devastating as the news of this artistic and human loss were, the world had to salute with utmost admiration a woman who, true to her formidable spirit, always lived a life that was determined by the choices she wanted.
Now, considering that she won her first audience by acting one scene from "On ne badine pas avec l'Amour" in front of her future mentor, got her international consecration by playing the leading role in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and rose from her ashes with her superlative work in "Amour", one can conclude that the word Amour is most definitely a good luck charm to Emmanuelle Riva. - Actress
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French ballet dancer Leslie Caron was discovered by the legendary MGM star Gene Kelly during his search for a co-star in one of the finest musicals ever filmed, the Oscar-winning An American in Paris (1951), which was inspired by and based on the music of George Gershwin. Leslie's gamine looks and pixie-like appeal would be ideal for Cinderella-type rags-to-riches stories, and Hollywood made fine use of it. Combined with her fluid dancing skills, she became one of the top foreign musical artists of the 1950s, while her triple-threat talents as a singer, dancer and actress sustained her long after musical film's "Golden Age" had passed.
Leslie Claire Margaret Caron was born in France on July 1, 1931. Her father, Claude Caron, was a French chemist, and her American-born mother, Margaret Petit, had been a ballet dancer back in the States during the 1920s. Leslie herself began taking dance lessons at age 11. She was on holidays at her grandparents' estate near Grasse when the Allies landed on the 15th of August 1944. After the German rendition, she and her family went to Paris to live. There she attended the Convent of the Assumption and started ballet training. While studying at the National Conservatory of Dance, she appeared at age 14 in "The Pearl Diver," a show for children where she danced and played a little boy. At age 16, she was hired by the renowned Roland Petit to join the Ballet des Champs-Elysees, where she was immediately given solo parts.
Leslie's talent and reputation as a dancer had already been recognized when on opening night of Petit's 1948 ballet "La Rencontre," which was based on the theme of Orpheus and featured the widely-acclaimed dancer 'Jean Babilee', she was seen by then-married Hollywood couple Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair. Leslie did not meet the famed pair at the end of the show that night as the 17-year-old went home dutifully right after her performance, but one year later Kelly remembered Leslie's performance when he returned to Paris in search for a partner for his upcoming movie musical An American in Paris (1951). The rest is history.
Kelly and newcomer Caron's touching performances and elegant and exuberant footwork (especially in the "Our Love Is Here to Stay" and "Embraceable You" numbers, as well as the dazzling 17-minute ballet to the title song) had critics and audiences simply enthralled. The film, directed by Vincente Minnelli, won a total of six Oscar awards, including "Best Picture," plus a Golden Globe for "Best Picture in a Musical or Comedy". Leslie was put under a seven-year MGM contract where her luminous skills would also be featured in non-musical showcases.
While Leslie's dramatic mettle was tested as a New Orleans nightclub entertainer opposite Ralph Meeker's boxer in Glory Alley (1952) and as a French governess in The Story of Three Loves (1953), it was as the child-like urchin who falls for a cruel carnival puppeteer (Mel Ferrer) in Lili (1953) that finally lifted Leslie to Academy Award attention. The film, which went on to inspire the Tony-winning Broadway musical "Carnival," earned Leslie not only an Oscar nomination, but the British Film Award for "Best Actress" as well. At her waif-like best once again in the musical Daddy Long Legs (1955), Leslie was paired this time with the "other" MGM male dancing legend Fred Astaire. The story, which unfolded in an appealing Henry Higgins/Eliza Dolittle style, was partly choreographed by Roland Petit, who founded the Ballet des Champs-Elysees, Leslie's former dance company.
While the actress gave poignant life to the ugly-duckling-turned-swan tale, The Glass Slipper (1955), choreographed by Petit and co-starring Britisher Michael Wilding as Prince Charming, Leslie also played a ballerina in love with WWII soldier John Kerr in Gaby (1956), a lukewarm remake of the superior Waterloo Bridge (1940). It took another plush musical classic, Gigi (1958), to remind audiences once again of Leslie's unique, international appeal. Audrey Hepburn, who had played the title part on Broadway, was keen on doing the film, but producer Arthur Freed wrote the part expressly for Leslie. It was also Freed who called up Fred Astaire to suggest her as his leading lady in Gigi (1958). Leslie tried the role out on the London stage prior to doing the film version. The musical wound up receiving nine Academy Awards, including "Best Picture," and Leslie herself was nominated for a Golden Globe as "Best Musical/Comedy Actress".
A few more forgettable film roles came and went until she returned triumphantly in a non-musical adaptation of a highly successful 1954 Broadway musical. The film version of Fanny (1961) was more adult in nature for Leslie and was blessed with gorgeous cinematography, a touching script and the continental flavor of veterans, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, and Horst Buchholz. At the movie's centerpiece is a child-like Leslie (at age 30!) who is mesmerizing as a young girl with child who is deserted by her sailor/boyfriend. Even more adult in scope was the shattering British drama The L-Shaped Room (1962) wherein the actress plays a pregnant French refugee who is abandoned yet again. She earned her a second British Academy Award and a second Oscar nomination for this superb performance.
On stage in London with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Leslie earned applause in another Audrey Hepburn Broadway vehicle, "Ondine," in 1961. While the mid-1960s and 1970s saw her film career take a Hollywood detour into breezy comedy with a number of lightweight fare opposite the likes of Rock Hudson, Cary Grant and Warren Beatty, she managed to shine with a complex working class mother role in the remarkable Italian film Il padre di famiglia (1967) starring Nino Manfredi and Ugo Tognazzi, and was spotted in the popular crossover film Valentino (1977) starring iconic Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev.
In the 1980s, Leslie appeared in stage productions of "Can-Can", "On Your Toes" and "One for the Tango". She also was invited and accepted to appear on American TV. At the age of 75, the actress won her first Emmy Award with her very moving portrayal of an elderly woman and closeted rape victim in a 2006 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999). More recent filming have included Damage (1992) by Louis Malle, Chocolat (2000) by Lasse Hallström, and the Merchant Ivory romantic comedy/drama The Divorce (2003).
Leslie's private life has been more turbulent than expected. She is divorced from the late meat packing heir and musician Geordie Hormel; from avant-garde Royal Shakespeare director Peter Hall, by whom she has two children, Christopher and Jennifer (both of whom have careers in the entertainment field); and from her Chandler (1971) movie producer Michael Laughlin.
One of the few MGM post-musical stars to enjoy a long, lasting and formidable dramatic career, Leslie Caron is still continuing today though on a much more limited basis. In 2008, the actress published her memoirs, "Thank Heaven," later translated to French as "Une Francaise à Hollywood". In 2010, she triumphed on the Chatelet Theater stage in Paris with her portrayal of Madame Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music. More recently the still mesmerizing octogenarian had a recurring role as a countess in the British TV series The Durrells (2016). Over the years, she has received a number of "Life Achievement" awards for her contributions to both film and dance.- Actress
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Stéfi Celma was born on 9 October 1986 in Paris, France. She is an actress, known for Call My Agent! (2015), Lost Bullet (2020) and Nice Girls.- Actress
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Ana Girardot was born on 1 August 1988 in Paris, France. She is an actress and director, known for Escobar: Paradise Lost (2014), The Returned (2012) and Babyphone (2023).- Actress
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Céline Sallette was born on 25 April 1980 in Bordeaux, France. She is an actress and director, known for House of Tolerance (2011), Hereafter (2010) and Rust and Bone (2012).- Lovely Jacqueline Sassard's career as a leading actress endured just over a decade and was launched not in her native country, but across the border in Italy. Her first featured role was as the titular heroine in Alberto Lattuada's Guendalina (1957) at the tender age of 17. This got her noticed and paved her way to headline in a string of popular comedies, beginning with March's Child (1958) (as a young woman going through a failing marriage to an older architect, played by Gabriele Ferzetti). For her performance, Sassard was awarded a Zulueta Prize as best actress at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 1958. In the black comedy Three Murderesses (1959), she again proved her flair, portraying one of a trio of jilted ladies plotting revenge on a caddish playboy (Alain Delon). That same year, she also made two significant forays into serious drama with Luigi Zampa's Il magistrato (1959) and Valerio Zurlini's Violent Summer (1959), set in Italy during World War II. Now at the height of her popularity, Sassard was featured on the cover of Tempo magazine and in an edition of Playboy. By the early 60s, the honeymoon was suddenly over. Her subsequent films were of decidedly lower quality, including peplum, tawdry costume dramas and corny musical comedy. A perhaps non unexpected two-year hiatus followed, after which Sassard made a brief comeback as an enigmatic Austrian princess in Joseph Losey's off-beat drama Accident (1967) and as one third of a ménage à trois in Les Biches (1968), alongside Stéphane Audran and Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Little information exists about Sassard's private life, save that she left show biz upon her marriage to automobile manufacturer Gianni Lancia and eventually retired -- far from the limelight -- to the well-to-do neighbourhood of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of southern France. - Leading French actress, born Catherine Vitale in Marseille, first trained as a dancer at fourteen. She subsequently attended the Institut cinématographique de Marseille and began on stage from 1956. She has acted in plays by Molière, Achard, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Anouilh, Shaw and Guitry. With Marie-France Boyer she co-founded the Théâtre du quotidien. Catherine Rouvel is best known on the screen for her roles in Jean Renoir's Picnic on the Grass (1959), Marcel Carné's Les assassins de l'ordre (1971), Jacques Deray's classic gangster film Borsalino (1970) and Jean-Jacques Annaud's Black and White in Color (1976).
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This provocative sex kitten had the obvious makings of a superstar blonde bombshell and could have ended up in film history annals as merely a second-rate Brigitte Bardot, but Marina Vlady rose above her sex symbol status and proved she was capable of so much more. In her prime she was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a "Best Actress" award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival for her stunning performance in The Conjugal Bed (1963) with Italy's Ugo Tognazzi.
She was born Marina De Poliakoff-Baïdaroff, in Clichy, France on May 10, 1938, the youngest of four acting sisters. Her Russian-born father was a well-established painter in France. While young Marina trained in dance and initially seemed to entertain thoughts of becoming a prima ballerina, she discovered, as did her sisters, a closer kinship to acting. The most outgoing of her siblings, Monica caught the eye of talent agents via more uninhibited roles. Older sister Odile Versois, who possessed a similar feline beauty, was the first of her family to enter pictures. Marina (playing a youthful roller-skater) and another sister Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff made their minor film debuts in Orage d'été (1949) [Summer Storm], which featured Odile. The remaining sister Hélène Vallier was featured in Marina's highly-praised film Penne nere (1952) (Black Feathers).
In 1955, at the ripe young age of 17, Marina met and married director/writer/actor Robert Hossein, who featured her prominently and seductively in a number of his films including The Wicked Go to Hell (1955), as a femme fatale bent on revenge, Pardonnez nos offenses (1956), Double Agents (1959) and, notably, Toi... le venin (1958) [aka Nude in a White Car], which co-starred sister Odile. She had two sons by Hossein but the marriage lasted only a few years.
Gracing both French and Italian productions throughout most of her career, Marina was not shy at playing unsympathetic, even caustic characters, and proved adept at both saucy comedy and edgy drama, appearing for such notable directors as Jean-Luc Godard and Christian-Jaque. Playing opposite some of Europe's finest leading men, she was a vision in loveliness alongside Marcello Mastroianni in Penne nere (1952), a touching WWII drama, she also co-starred with Italy's top character actor Aldo Fabrizi in Too Young for Love (1953). One of her rare English-speaking appearances came with the Orson Welles historical drama Chimes at Midnight (1965).
Marina became a strong social and political activist, notably for women's reproductive rights, into the 1970s. She continued strongly in films with Sapho ou La fureur d'aimer (1971), Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil (1972), Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975), the Hungarian film The Two of Them (1977), The Bermuda Triangle (1978) and L'oeil du maître (1980). As she moved Into the 1980's, the actress turned more and more towards TV work.
Married three times, Vlady was the widow of heralded Russian poet/songwriter/actor Vladimir Vysotskiy, her last husband, who allegedly died of heart failure in 1980 at the age 42 after years of alcohol and drug abuse.
Later films would include Bordello (1985), in which she played a French madam; a smaller role as the wife of hotel manager Philippe Noiret in the comedy Twist again à Moscou (1986); leads in both the Greek drama Anemos stin poli (1996) and the gay-themed French film A Few Days of Respite (2010). She also had a recurring role in the French TV dramedy series Sam (2016).
In her later years, Marina and longtime companion, Léon Schwartzenberg, a leading French-Jewish cancer specialist widely known as a radical political activist, became involved in a number of social injustices. He passed away in 2003. As a writer, she published a book on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and continued performing on stage, including a political one-woman show on one of her books about husband Vysotsky. Marina outlived all her her elder sisters. Odile died in 1980, Helene in 1988 and Olga in 2009.- Actress
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Nailia Harzoune was born on 19 June 1990 in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Hautes-Pyrénées, France. She is an actress, known for Patients (2016), Made in France (2015) and Divorces! (2009).- Actress
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Bernadette Lafont was born at the Protestant Health Home of Nîmes in Gard, the only child of a pharmacist and a housewife from the Cévennes. Her mother always wanted a boy to name Bernard and, once she gave birth to a girl, she enjoyed to hold this against all the catholics she knew as the proof that their God either was blind or didn't exist. Often dressed as a boy and nicknamed Bernard, Bernadette nevertheless had a great relationship with her parents. Having spent part of her childhood in Saint-Geniès-de-Malgoirès, she returned to Nîmes where she took ballet lessons at the local Opera House. She proved to be a gifted student and she did three little tours and about twenty galas there. An extroverted girl with a fervent imagination, she used to spend her holidays at the Cévennes family mansion playing dress-up with her friend Annie, along whom she used to pretend to be an actress from an imaginary West End Club, working in Italian cinema: doing this started to win her a lot of male attention. She also began to develop a passion for film from an early age, adopting Brigitte Bardot and Marina Vlady as role models.
On the summer of 1955, the "Arènes" of Nîmes hosted a Festival of Dramatic Arts for the second time: 40 actors came from Paris while 50 regional aspiring thespians and 30 dancing students were recruited on the place. The main attraction was a production of "La Tragédie des Albigeois", a new play which featured music by Georges Delerue and starred, in the leading roles, the acclaimed stage veteran Jean Deschamps and a talented young actor called Jean-Louis Trintignant, who would go a long way from there. The play also offered bit parts to future directing genius Maurice Pialat, Trintignant's then wife Colette Dacheville (the future Stéphane Audran), and the skilled Gérard Blain, who, by then, had already appeared in a handful of movies, although usually in uncredited roles. Having seen Gérard on his way to a rehearsal at the "Arènes", Bernadette was immediately won over by his "bad boy" charm and decided to walk around the place (which had ironically been the spot of her parents' first encounter) to catch his attention: she did. Already separated from wife Estella Blain, Gérard immediately developed a great interest in Bernadette, stating that he was willing to bring her to Paris to introduce her to certain people at the Opera House and stating how glad he was that she didn't have any interest in pursuing an acting career, something he regarded, in a woman's case, as a road to perdition. After she finished her studies, Bernadette's parents gave her permission to marry Gérard and she did so in 1957.
Blain found his first relevant film role in Julien Duvivier's brilliant thriller Deadlier Than the Male (1956) and Bernadette spent a lot of time with him on the movie's set, something that made her fascination with cinema grow even bigger. The film opened to positive reviews and was also lauded (quite an oddity for a Duvivier feature) by the ruthless "Cahiers du Cinéma" critics, including the young François Truffaut, who called Blain "the French James Dean". Gérard decided to give the critic a phone call to thank him for the kind words and, after the two had a couple lunches together, Truffaut ended up making him a work offer. It's always been very hard for film critics to point at a specific work as the undisputed start of the French New Wave: for many people it's Agnès Varda's La Pointe Courte (1955) , but the director herself never wanted to be bestowed this honor and prefers to be considered a godmother to the movement. Others think that the roots of this new school of cinema can be found in the early shorts of Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut. The latter's The Mischief Makers (1957) is certainly one of the most significant of these ground-breaking works and happens to be the project for which Blain was recruited. Truffaut wanted to shoot the short in Nîmes and, with the exception of Gérard, he hired only non-professional actors: this included several local children and, of course, Bernadette. The mini-feature is centered around two lovers, Gérard (Blain) and Bernadette Jouve (Lafont), who are spied on by a group of children and are separated forever once he leaves for a mountain excursion from which he will never return. The character of Bernadette, a head-turner who becomes a great object of attention wherever she goes, was very much based on the real-life Lafont, just like her relationship with her beau Gérard (who has to leave Nîmes for three months, promising to marry her at his return) was very much reminiscent of her engagement to Blain. The two actors stayed at the house of Bernadette's parents for the entire shooting of the short. She chose to act in bare feet the whole time to make a homage to Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and, at the same time, a favour to Blain, not exactly a man of exceptional height. When he had married Bernadette, Gérard had sworn to himself that his new wife would have never stolen the spotlight from him like Estella had previously done: unfortunately for his plans, he was soon going to be sorely disappointed. Truffaut managed to get the best out of the young actress through rather unorthodox methods at times (like threatening to slap her hadn't she cried convincingly), but they established a great chemistry in the end and he taught her not to look at someone like Bardot as a source of inspiration, since the big star didn't possess any gift Bernadette should have been jealous of. "Les Mistons" turned out to be a little gem which already contained all the best elements of the great director's cinema. During the shooting, Bernadette got to know many other key figures of the upcoming French New Wave, including Rivette, Paul Gégauff and Claude Chabrol. The latter had already asked her to appear in his debut feature film by the time Truffaut had proposed her to star in "Les Mistons": she had accepted both offers simultaneously and, once the shooting of the short movie was over, she immediately embarked on another adventure.
Chabrol's atmospheric Le Beau Serge (1958) is now officially considered the movie that kickstarted the French New Wave: it was shot in Sardent, where the director had spent many of his childhood years. The main cast was formed by Bernadette, Gérard and another young actor called Jean-Claude Brialy, who would soon become a cornerstone of French cinema in general and an assiduous presence in New Wave movies in particular. The movie takes place in a community of drunkards and is centered around the relationship between the rebellious Serge (Blain) and his better balanced friend François (Brialy). Bernadette got the juicy role of Serge's slutty sister-in-law and lover, Marie. This role of a very impudent and provocative woman of slightly vulgar charms allowed her to introduce the French audience to a new female image that was very much different from the ones usually found in the cinema of the period and worked as a prototype to the unforgettable gallery of "bad girl" types her cinematic work will forever be strictly associated to. The movie was very much praised along with the great performances of its actors. Bernadette was immediately featured on the cover of a recent edition of "The Cahiers du Cinéma" along with Brialy. Her rise in popularity had predictably an immediate negative impact on her relationship with Blain. The two male stars of "Le Beau Serge" were paired again in Chabrol's subsequent feature, the least interesting The Cousins (1959), but, this time, the leading female role was given to an absolutely unremarkable Juliette Mayniel. Bernadette started to grow more and more bored as Gérard was away from home to shoot the movie and even tried to contact him on the set asking for a divorce.
Bernadette teamed up again with Chabrol in the director's third released feature , Web of Passion (1959), which didn't work as well as a thriller rather than as an ironic spoof on the clichés of the genre and actor piece. The film's acting laurels go undoubtedly to Bernadette as a saucy waitress, Jean-Paul Belmondo as a cheeky young man with an alcohol problem and the glorious Madeleine Robinson (rightly awarded with a Volpi Cup at Venice Film Festival) as a troubled wife and mother. By the end of the year, Bernadette had eventually divorced from Blain and gotten into a relationship with a Hungarian sculptor she had known on her 20th birthday, Diourka Medveczky. 1960 was a turning point for her, as the work she did helped cementing her status as the female face of the New Wave. L'eau à la bouche (1960) was the first and most famous feature of Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, another critic of the Cahiers who wanted to follow the same path of his colleagues turned directors and decided to call Bernadette after seeing "Le Beau Serge". The superb The Good Time Girls (1960) was Chabrol's fourth movie and remains one of his masterworks. The film follows four girls (Bernadette, Stéphane Audran, Clotilde Joano and Lucile Saint-Simon) who are bored with their lives and waiting for a positive change to arrive, whether it's the coming of true love or the fulfillment of a dream. With many scenes set in the shop where the four characters work (a surreal place where time seems to have stopped), Chabrol was able to create something that seemed to come out of Sartre, managing to perfectly spread to the viewer the sense of loneliness and boredom weighing down the girls, seemingly trapped in the antechamber of hell. One of the film's strongest assets were three performances: tragic actress Joano gave a delicate and poetic portrayal of the ill-fated Jacqueline, Italian veteran Ave Ninchi added a lot of authority to her Madame Louise and, of course, Bernadette did the usual splendid job lending her energetic screen persona to Jane, the obvious haywire of the group, but, at the same time, a character more vulnerable and less gutsy than her usual creations. The movie allowed the actress to stretch her range and gave her a lot of good memories, such as pushing journalists on a swimming pool (which is at the heart of a key scene) along with Stéphane, somehow managing to galvanize the normally extremely shy girl. To appear in the movie, Bernadette had to decline the role of prostitute Clarisse (eventually played by Michèle Mercier) in Truffaut's masterpiece Shoot the Piano Player (1960), but it was a worthy sacrifice. The same year she gave birth to her first daughter with her now husband Diourka, the future actress Élisabeth Lafont, in the same health house where she was born. Bernadette's next collaboration with Chabrol was the remarkable Wise Guys (1961), where she got her most memorable role so far as Ambroisine, a girl who gets recruited by Jean-Claude Brialy's Ronald to create trouble in an old-fashioned environment with her modern, liberated persona, but eventually becomes impossible for him to control because of her mean-spirited nature. Her anarchic side was used to full potential for the first time, something that lead to one of the best portrayals of dark lady in a New Wave movie. But, like the other characters in the film weren't ready for a new type of woman such as Ambroisine, the movie-goers of the period seemed unwilling to fall for the charms of this revolutionary type of woman Bernadette was bringing to the screen and "Les godelureaux" was a box office flop, just like "Les Bonnes Femmes" had been. The latter, now regarded as one of Chabrol's best, was also a critical disaster, although Bernadette got positive reviews for her performance. Watched today, it's clear that both movies outclass several entries from the director's most celebrated noir cycle from the late 60's to the early 70's. But considering the tepid impact that her movies used to have with the big public, Bernadette was seen just as a half-star and icon of niche cinema exclusively and her agent used to have much trouble in finding her roles at the time. Producer Carlo Ponti once offered her to come to Italy to do some movies: now that his wife Sophia Loren was moving to Hollywood (not exactly to electrifying results), he thought there was a void in Italian cinema that needed to be filled by a feisty, curvaceous actress. This proposal lead to nothing. A project with Godard never saw the light of the day. Rivette never bothered to answer a letter by Bernadette where she had asked him to cast her in his debut feature film, Paris Belongs to Us (1961). She was offered her ticket to major stardom with Jacques Demy's Lola (1961), but she had to decline the title role in the movie because she was pregnant with her second child, David. The part eventually went to the limited Anouk Aimée, who gave the best acting she could ever be capable of, but it goes without saying that, had Bernadette played the part, she would have elevated the movie to entirely new levels.
The 60s, for most of the time, didn't prove to be a very happy decade for Bernadette as she got to face both a personal and professional crisis. Immediately after "Les Godelureaux", her talents were wasted in several obscure movies and shorts. In 1962 she appeared in And Satan Calls the Turns (1962), which boosted a high-profile cast, but was scripted by Roger Vadim, something that predictably sealed the movie's fate. Although officially directed by one-shot filmmaker Grisha Dabat, the film contained all the worst elements of Vadim's cinema and Bernadette was given such a thankless role that not even she could elevate it. One year later she was without an agent and took a break from acting, also to give birth to her third daughter, the future actress Pauline Lafont. The passion between her and Diourka had cooled down by now and the main reason they stayed together for a few years more was their common love for cinema: he was indeed planning to make his directorial debut. For the time being, they tried to make it work by opting for an open marriage where both enjoyed plenty of extra-conjugal affairs. Bernadette's friends Truffaut and Chabrol couldn't really come to her rescue either. The first sent her a letter which read: "You chose life. I chose cinema. I don' think our paths will ever cross again". The second was now engaged to Audran and was soon to enter a second phase of his career, one where he regularly did films whose central female characters weren't witty, animated provincial girls, but frozen, humourless bourgeoisie ladies that were tailor-made for Stéphane. In 1964, Bernadette had a rather unhappy "rentrée" with Male Hunt (1964) , a very disappointing comedy made by the talented Édouard Molinaro on an utterly unfunny script by Michel Audiard. Her role as a prostitute was hardly one minute long, but she had little money and a ton of debts at the time, so she had to accept everything she was offered. During the decade, she found work in a few more resonant projects such as Louis Malle's The Thief of Paris (1967), Costa-Gavras's The Sleeping Car Murder (1965) and Jean Aurel's Lamiel (1967), but she was given very indifferent roles in all of them. Once again, going after unusual projects by new, alternative auteurs was the decisive factor that helped her putting her career back on track. In Diourka's remarkable first work, the short Marie et le curé (1967), she shined as a provocative young woman who seduces a priest to nefarious consequences for both. Shortly after, she appeared in the silent movie Le révélateur (1968), which was directed by her love interest of the time, Philippe Garrel, and co-starred Laurent Terzieff, opposite whom she had always dearly desired to act. The film was shot in Spain and Bernadette helped funding it thanks to a loan from Chabrol. At around the same time, she also shot the "conjoined" shorts Prologue (1970) and Piège (1970), which were written and directed by Jacques Baratier and co-starred the great Bulle Ogier. Having seen Bulle in her most acclaimed film role in Rivette's titanic achievement Mad Love (1969), Bernadette had been astonished by the actress' monstrous amount of talent and was a bit scared by the thought of having to cross blades with her. As two thieves locked in a mysterious house by a vampiresque entity, the two actresses went on to gave a great lesson in metaphysical acting. Closer to an example of visual arts or Noh theatre than a cinematic work, Barratier's double short may feel too extreme even to some New Wave purists, but is nevertheless a fascinating watch and a must-see for the fans of the two ladies, equally impressive in the acting department and perfectly suited to create the needed physical contrast, with the taller brunette adding an earthy element and the petite blonde providing an ethereal quality. Bernadette and Bulle developed a beautiful friendship which lead to several other collaborations. In 1969, Diourka made his first feature film, Paul (1969). Jean-Pierre Léaud, a cult actor if there ever was one, had loved the Hungarian sculptor's previous shorts and sent him a letter asking to work with him, so that he would add another unique title to his genial filmography. He so earned the honour to play title character in Diourka's (only) film, as a little bourgeois who escapes from his family, joins a group of sages and meets temptation in Bernadette's form. None of these works really gave the actress a major popularity boost, however. Unlike fellow female standouts of the New Wave such as Ogier, Edith Scob, Delphine Seyrig, Jeanne Moreau and Emmanuelle Riva, Bernadette didn't have theatrical roots, but this didn't prevent her from appearing in stage productions of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" and Picasso's surrealist play "Le désir attrapé par la queue" in this period. The official start of her career renaissance came, however, at the end of the decade with Nelly Kaplan's A Very Curious Girl (1969), a retelling of sorts of Michelet's "La Sorcière". Conceived as a monument to her talents, the transgressive movie stars Bernadette as Marie, a village girl who becomes a prostitute to settle a score with society (winning male and female hearts alike) and eventually gets revenge on all her men clients. The vendetta bit had been inspired by an off-screen feud between director Kaplan (an angry feminist) and actor Michael Constantin, who had refused to recite the line 'they were very happy and didn't have children" because he was a family man and opted for a more prudish "they were very happy and had children" instead. Bernadette's fearless performance had such a huge impact that, after the film's release, she got offers to star in porn features along with obscene proposals from the more misguided moviegoers. Once again, the public had proved not to have understood what kind of woman she represented, but auteur cinema was now going to welcome her back to a fuller extent.
The 70's were definitely a more successful decade for Bernadette. She was still seen as an alternative actress and was hardly ever offered traditional roles in conventional movies, but she didn't care about it, since she felt more at home in unique experiments such as La ville-bidon (1971), Valparaiso, Valparaiso (1971) or Sex-Power (1970). Moshé Mizrahi's feminist dramedy Sophie's Ways (1971) offered her one of her best parts as the rebellious wife of an excellent Michel Duchaussoy in one of his least charming roles. Jean Renoir himself was knocked out by her performance. In 1971, Bernadette finally got to work with Rivette for the first time in the director's epic Out 1 (1971), originally conceived as an 8 part mini-series to sell to French TV. The movie is centered around 12 main characters that work as pieces of an intricate puzzle and Bernadette was teamed up with several acting heavyweights such as Michael Lonsdale, Françoise Fabian, Juliet Berto and her former co-stars Léaud and Ogier. She played the role of Lonsdale's ex-girlfriend, a writer he tries to recruit for his mysterious dancing group. The actress, unlike other cast members, wasn't used to Rivette's working method, which involved little explanations and a lot of room for improvisation. Since it took her a lot of time to adapt to this style, she was reproached by the director, who harshly accused her of having chosen not to do anything, therefore hurting her feelings. Eventually these words helped Bernadette to find a way to incorporate her "handicap" into the character, imagining that Marie was experimenting writer's block like she had found herself unable to act. A scene where she and Léaud kept just staring at each other because they didn't know what to say was kept by Rivette because he liked the authentic feeling about it. Eventually French TV never bought "Out 1". Rivette also cut it down to 4 hours in the form of Out 1: Spectre (1972), but both versions were hardly released outside of festival circuits. One year later, Bernadette got to play her best remembered and most iconic role: Camille Bliss in Truffaut's underrated black comedy A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972). As a girl who's released from prison so that she can be analyzed by a student of criminology, the actress got to play a role that exemplified her career (being 'one of a kind') and felt like the summation and sublimation of all the naughty ladies she had played before: of coarse manners and vulgar laughter, indomitable, unstoppable, irreverent, incandescent and more of a destructive force that she had ever been in any of her previous movies, including "Marie et le Curé" , "La fiancée du pirate" and "Les godelureaux". Her performance won her the "Triomphe du Cinéma Français" and was stellarly received in the US, with "Newsweek" and the "New York Magazine" giving it such phenomenal praise that a French journalist wrote this comment: "Bernadette Lafont, historical monument to the U.S.A.". After bringing the female type she so often personified to its definitive cinematic form, Bernadette gradually started her image makeover. The first example was in Jean Eustache's supreme masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973), where she would have been the logical choice to play the title "whore" Veronika, but was actually given the touching role of the title "mother" Marie. Eustache, another former critic of the Cahiers had known her for about ten years and given her the script in 1971. After reading a couple pages she had been immediately won over and realized how much she desired to do it. The director's towering 4 hour achievement is centered around a love triangle formed of Eustache's screen alter-ego Alexandre (Léaud in his very best performance), slutty nurse Veronika (non-professional actress Françoise Lebrun, whose angelic appearance provided the perfect contrast with the nature of the character) and Bernadette's Marie, Alexandre's patient girlfriend who enjoys a very open relationship with him. Managing to convey an entire era in the characters' long, sublime dialogues, Eustache easily made one of the greatest and most significant movies of the French New Wave. Bernadette's portrayal of Marie showed a vibrant, affecting sensitivity that she had hardly done before, giving further demonstration of her talent and versatility. The film was shown in competition at the 1973 Cannes film festival, where it predictably got a mixed reception: some, including Jury President Ingrid Bergman, hated it, while others worshiped it as the future of cinema. In the end, Eustache was given the Grand Prize of the Jury. The same year, Bernadette also appeared in Nadine Trintignant's Défense de savoir (1973), which was no great shakes, but also starred two of the nation's top actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Michel Bouquet, both of which she greatly admired. She teamed up with the two again, respectively in The Probability Factor (1976) and Vincent mit l'âne dans un pré (et s'en vint dans l'autre) (1975). She was particularly entertaining in the second as an eccentric rich lady, proving that she could be also very convincing at playing very chic and sophisticated characters. The movie ends on a high note with the actress giving an unforgettable, sexy laugh. Daughters Élisabeth and Pauline were also given roles in the movie. The final great role Bernadette played in this period was in Rivette's misunderstood masterpiece Noroît (1976): Giulia, daughter of the Sun. Centred, like many of the director's works, on the dichotomy between light and shadow and day and night, the movie sees Geraldine Chaplin's Morag ending up on a mysterious island ruled by an Amazon-like society where males are either enslaved or, like in her brother's case, murdered. A great revenge tale not without its 'steampunk' element, the film is certainly highlighted by the transforming performance of Bernadette as a ruthless, modern day Pirate queen, cutting one of her female minions' throat with one of the most frighteningly icy expressions ever recorded by a camera and eventually facing Chaplin in a climatic knife duel on the ramparts. Unfortunately, Rivette's previous feature Duelle (1976) had been so unsuccessful that "Noroît " wasn't even released and, to this day, it remains the director's least popular work, which means that many people aren't familiar with Bernadette's sinister, against type performance, which ranks with her very best and is undoubtedly one of the great villainous turns in New Wave cinema. By 1978 there had been another change of muse in Chabrol's movies, as an astounding 24 years old Isabelle Huppert headlined the cast of one of his best works, Violette (1978), the first of a series of successful collaborations which included the director's number one masterpiece, La Cérémonie (1995). Bernadette was given a brief, but memorable cameo as Violette's cellmate. This 1969-1978 period easily represents the zenith of her career. After that, it was a bit difficult for her to deal with the changing times.
By the end of the 70's, most of the New Wave auteurs had moved on to more conventional projects and French cinema was entering a far less creative phase. Bernadette's desire to constantly challenge herself and look for different, ground-breaking projects often lead her to be part of totally unremarkable movies. Her nadir was probably represented by her two collaborations with Michel Caputo, arguably the worst French director to ever work with name actors (before he exclusively moved on to do porn under several aliases): Qu'il est joli garçon l'assassin de papa (1979) and Si ma gueule vous plaît... (1981), two supposed comic works that would make Michel Audiard's comedies look like Bringing Up Baby (1938) in comparison. But, although the modern viewer can hardly believe the existence of such detrimental works, they actually weren't unusual products of their time, but clear evidence of a scary change of taste on the public's part. Actresses like Bernadette, who used to mainly work for an audience of intellectuals, had to struggle hard to keep afloat after this change of tide and, in the early 80's, she had to lend her talents to a dozen of movies that weren't worth it. The Lee Marvin vehicle Dog Day (1984) was the second occasion she found herself working with a mega-star in an international production since her cameo opposite the legendary Kirk Douglas in Dick Clement's Swinging London abomination Catch Me a Spy (1971). Although she was given a bit more to do this time around, this title didn't add anything to her filmography either. Luckily, this wasn't the case of Claude Miller's L'effrontée (1985) a.k.a. "Impudent Girl". It's very ironic -and certainly not coincidental - that a movie going by this title and starring a 14 years old Charlotte Gainsbourg as a gutsy rebel would also feature Bernadette, who had, by all means, every maternity right on this type of character which had grown more and more diffused on the French screen thanks to her work. But the film had a much different flavour from the actress' vehicles from the 60's-70's: Gainsbourg's stubborn but ultimately good-hearted Charlotte is actually nothing like "Les Godelureaux"'s Ambroisine or "Une belle fille comme moi"'s Camille Bliss and Bernadette's Léone, the new love interest of Charlotte's father and mother of an asthmatic girl, is a very likable and moving character. Having moved on to more accessible projects, Bernadette naturally started to receive more award consideration as well, and her sweet, beautiful performance in Miller's movie was honored with a Best Supporting Actress César, one of the best and most inspired choices ever in the category. Her next project was Inspector Lavardin (1986), the second and best movie centered around Jean Poiret's unconventional police inspector and her first collaboration with Chabrol since "Violette". Wearing the most recurring name of the director's heroines, Hélène, she also dyed her hair blond for the first time on his wishes, so that she would have taken a step further in changing her screen persona. She liked the idea and would keep blond hair for the rest of her life. She worked with Chabrol for a seventh (and last) time only one year later in one of the director's most gothic-like works, the underrated Masks (1987), which stars the great Philippe Noiret as a villainous TV presenter worthy of the pen of Ann Radcliffe, Christian Legagneur, who keeps an innocent Anne Brochet imprisoned in his imposing manor and wishes to kill her to get his hands on her fortune. The juicy role of Legagneur's masseuse won Bernadette a second nomination for the Supporting Actress César.
In 1988, Bernadette's life was sadly affected by a horrible personal tragedy. In August, she was spending a holiday in the Cévennes family mansion, La Serre du Pomaret, along with son David, daughter Pauline and painter Pierre De Chevilly, her new life mate. On the 11th day of the month, Pauline left the house early in the morning to have a long walk to lose weight. By midday she hadn't come back yet. The family began to worry and David started to look for her. Bernadette was unfortunately committed to appear in a TV show in Nice and she left with her heart in her throat, hoping that, in the mean time, David or Pierre would have found Pauline. That wasn't to be. The family lived many weeks in a state of anguish, using the TV show "Avis de Recherche" to diffuse some photos of Pauline in the hope that someone could have shed some light on the mystery. There were several false reports from people who claimed to have seen her and Bernadette kept fooling herself for a long time, wanting to believe that the quest would have been greeted with success. Tragically, on the 21st November, Pauline's body was found in a ravine. Her death was officially called a hiking accident, although its circumstances are still mysterious to this day and some people considered the suicide theory. Bernadette dealt with her devastating grief by throwing herself into her job: always an extremely prolific actress, she got to work more and more and, as a result, she added a lot of unremarkable titles to her resume. She would still find a few good parts in the following decades.
Between 1990 and 2013, the actress added over 70 titles to her film and TV resume. Her talents were rather wasted in Raúl Ruiz's uneven Genealogies of a Crime (1997) and in Pascal Bonitzer's delightfully cynical Nothing About Robert (1999). She shined much more as an alcoholic mother in Personne ne m'aime (1994) (where she teamed up with Ogier and Léaud once more), a former teacher who almost ends up abducting her grandchildren in Les petites vacances (2006), an antique shop dealer who still has a great ascendancy over younger men in Bazar (2009) and a family matriarch in the comedy Prête-moi ta main (2006) opposite Alain Chabat and successor Gainsbourg. Her performance in this movie won her a third nomination for the Best Supporting Actress César. Her massive body of TV work from this period was highlighted by her performances in La très excellente et divertissante histoire de François Rabelais (2010) and La femme du boulanger (2010). She also did more stage work than ever in the 2000s. Starting from 2010, she was again employed for a few projects that had a bigger impact. First she borrowed her wonderful, husky voice to a treacherous nanny in the lovely animated feature A Cat in Paris (2010), which was Oscar-nominated. This nasty lady role felt like a homage to the characters that had made her famous. The following year, Bernadette and fellow New Wave legend Emmanuelle Riva were unfortunately the latest victims of Julie Delpy's game of playing director, as they were cast in the actress' catastrophic vanity project Skylab (2011). Delpy's latest directorial feature contained all the typical elements that she thinks are enough to make a movie: a seemingly endless family reunion, characters talking about hot hair around a table and a few off-colour gags here and there. The two glorious veterans, sadistically mortified by the granny look they had to sport, did the best they could with the material they were given, but it was just too little to begin with and, consequently, they can't possibly be considered a real redeeming factor of the terribly written, lacklusterly directed and otherwise insipidly acted film. In 2012, Bernadette got her best role in years as the title character in Jérôme Enrico's black comedy Paulette (2012). Enrico's pensioner version of Breaking Bad (2008) sees Bernadette's Paulette, a penniless, xenophobic widow, finding herself in a Walter White type of situation as she gets into drug dealing to make a living and begins to smuggle hashish right under the nose of her son-in-law, a coloured cop. The actress was immediately won over by the script, finding it modern and socially significant and decided to give a strong characterization to her character. Getting inspiration from Charles Chaplin's heroes and Giulietta Masina's performance in The Road (1954), she provided Paulette with a clown side which came complete with a funny walk and her leading turn proved absolutely irresistible. The film opened to positive reviews and got more visibility outside France than Bernadette's latest vehicles and many were foreseeing another career renaissance for her. Sadly, it wasn't to be.
In early July 2013, Bernadette was on her way to her family mansion in Saint-André-de-Valborgne (Gard) when she was the victim of a stroke. Forced to stay in Grau-du-Roi for a while, she had a second one on the 22nd and was quickly moved to the University Hospital centre of Nîmes, where she tragically died three days later. Her funeral took place at the Protestant temple of Saint-André-de-Valborgne on the 29th. Her passing was a cause of great grief for an enormous number of people, as she had gradually become a huge favourite of the French audience and a cornerstone of their cinema, and her colleagues had always adored her on both a professional and personal level. The admiration she had earned through the years had been repeatedly proved by several career tributes, including an Honorary César, the title of Officer of the French Legion of Honour and medals from the "National Order of Merit" and the "Order of Arts and Letters".
Bernadette's legacy could never be extinguished, but, in addition to everything she had already bequeathed to cinema, she graced the silver screen for a last time even after her death through her final completed movie, Sylvain Chomet's Attila Marcel (2013). The movie, recently showed at Toronto film festival and released in French theatres, was greeted with positive reviews where big kudos were reserved to Bernadette's portrayal of the eccentric adoptive aunt of Guillaume Gouix's protagonist. With the film's upcoming release in many more countries, plenty of others will have the bitter honour to see her eventually taking leave. Since the 25th October 2013, the Municipal Theatre of Nîmes has been renamed the Bernadette Lafont Theatre to honour the memory of the great actress. A once unforeseeable and absolutely logical reaching point for the barefoot girl biking in the city's streets in "Les Mistons".- Actress
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Emmanuelle Seigner is the daughter of a well known photographer and her mother is a journalist. She was born in Paris, France on June 22, 1966. Her grandfather was Louis Seigner, chairman of the Comédie Française and who also appeared in several movies. Emmanuelle was raised at a convent school . At age fourteen she became a model. Her mysterious beauty made her an international cover-model. Jean-Luc Godard gave her a part in his crime movie Detective (1985), starring Johnny Hallyday and Nathalie Baye. In 1986 Emmanuelle played the part of Zanon a young girl in the movie Cours privé (1986) (by Pierre Granier-Deferre). She met Roman Polanski and married him. He gave her a part in the thriller Frantic (1988) with Harrison Ford. Four years later Polanski gave her the leading part in the movie Bitter Moon (1992).- Actress
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Strikingly beautiful French leading lady (Miss Paris of 1930) who first appeared on stage at the age of 13 at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, then did some modelling work and a year later joined the chorus line of the Moulin Rouge. She also performed the 'can-can' at the legendary Parisian nightclub Bal Tabarin. Her breakthrough came, when she was signed by the director Jean Renoir for a bit part in the film La Chienne (1931). From the mid-1930s she was given leading roles roles, usually as the femme fatale, best exemplified by Jean Gabin's faithless wife in Duvivier's They Were Five (1936). This established her as a bankable star and she was much in demand for other portrayals of courtesans, kind-hearted prostitutes and alluring exotics. One of her best films was the film noir Panique (1946). She also starred in the title role of Carmen (1944).
Eschewing offers from Hollywood, Viviane continued acting in French and Italian films during the 1950s. When her popularity began to wane she went into production with her then-husband Clément Duhour, but without much success. Suffering considerable financial hardship, Viviane had a lengthy absence from the screen but eventually re-appeared on television in the early 1970s and finished her career with a noteworthy role as Madame Gabrielle in Claude Chabrol's Nada (1974).- Line Noro was born on 22 February 1900 in Houdelaincourt, Meuse, Lorraine, France. She was an actress, known for L'assommoir (1933), I Accuse (1938) and The Well-Digger's Daughter (1940). She died on 4 November 1985 in Paris, France.
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Julie Delpy was born in Paris, France, in 1969 to Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, both actors.
She was first featured in Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (1985) at the age of fourteen. She has starred in many American and European productions since then, including Disney's The Three Musketeers (1993), Killing Zoe (1993), Three Colors: White (1994), and the "Before" series, alongside Ethan Hawke: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).
She graduated from NYU's film school, and wrote and directed the short film Blah Blah Blah (1995), which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. She is a resident of Los Angeles.- Marine Delterme is a French actress and former top model who started her career at the age of 17 modeling all over the world. After living in NY for a couple of years and having a successful career in the fashion world, she moved back to France to work with Jean-Luc Godard on her first film. Since then, her career took off and she hasn't stopped acting between French blockbuster films and auteur films, she gained great range in the roles she played. She has had the opportunity to work with English filmmakers such as Roland-Joffe's with his film Vatel starring Uma Thurman which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, Mike Figgis with his film Women and Men 2 and Christian Duguay with his film Coco Chanel starring Shirley Maclaine. In 2002, she started her title-role in Alice Nevers, which ran on TV for twenty years. This show was one of the most popular shows in France during the entire time it aired and holds a record in longevity. While on this series, she won several awards including 'best actress in a French series' and 'most popular French actress.' She has also developed a career as a sculptor. She has recently moved to Los Angeles with her husband Florian Zeller, director of Oscar winning film The Father.
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Solveig Dommartin was born on 16 May 1961 in Constantine, Constantine, France [now Algeria]. She was an actress and director, known for Wings of Desire (1987), Until the End of the World (1991) and It Would Only Take a Bridge (1998). She died on 11 January 2007 in Paris, France.- Karidja Touré was born on 14 February 1994 in Bondy, France. She is an actress, known for Girlhood (2014), Versus (2019) and In Your Hands (2018).
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Zabou Breitman was born on 30 October 1959 in Paris, France. She is an actress and director, known for Se souvenir des belles choses (2001), The Swallows of Kabul (2019) and The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak (1984). She was previously married to Fabien Chalon.- Marie Versini was born on 10 August 1939 in Paris, France. She was an actress, known for Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand (1966), Kennwort... Reiher (1964) and Wild Kurdistan (1965). She was married to Pierre Viallet. She died on 22 November 2021 in Pabu, Cotes-d'Armor, France.
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Eclectic is the qualificative that best defines the career of Yvonne Furneaux. Born in Roubaix (a big industrial town in the North of France) in 1926, the little girl was immediately placed under the sign of bilingualism, her father being English and her mother French. As a result, once this alluring brunette had become an actress, she could as easily play in an English or a French film, which did not prevent her from being a regular in Italy and in West Germany, with a foray into Spain. Likewise, she could appear in any film genre, from psychological dramas (Affair in Monte Carlo (1952), her film debut) to adventure yarns (The Master of Ballantrae (1953)), from war films (Il carro armato dell'8 settembre (1960)) to films noirs (Enough Rope (1963), The Champagne Murders (1967)), from sword & sandal movies (Slave Queen of Babylon (1963), The Lion of Thebes (1964)) to horror movies (The Mummy (1959)), from comedies (Versuchung im Sommerwind (1972) to chillers (Repulsion (1965)). The same is true for the quality of her films, ranging from bombs (Frankenstein's Great Aunt Tillie (1984), mediocre run-of-the mill products (The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964)), average works (Slave Queen of Babylon (1963)), quite good (Lisbon (1956)), good (The Beggar's Opera (1953)), very good (In the Name of the Italian People (1971)), excellent (Polanski's Repulsion (1965), as demented Catherine Deneuve's normal sister), to an unclassifiable masterpiece (Fellini's immortal La Dolce Vita (1960), in which she is Mastroianni ex-wife). Such heterogeneity more or less put Yvonne Furneaux at a disadvantage, despite an undeniable acting talent and her having been chosen by great directors (Peter Brook, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Claude Autant-Lara, Roman Polanski, Claude Chabrol and Dino Risi. Another reason why she is not remembered as she should be, is the fact she gave up appearing on the screens little time after marrying cinematographer Jacques Natteau in the late sixties. One should not however dismiss or forget what I would call her cold beauty, which particularly worked wonders when she played haughty women of power such as Princess Ananka (in the classic of the genre,Terence Fisher's The Mummy (1959)), Semiramide or Cleopatra. Without a doubt, Yvonne Furneaux needs better than oblivion.- Édith Scob was a French stage and screen actress. Though Édith Scob was a major figure in French theater for over half a century and appeared in over a hundred feature film and television productions, she will always be remembered first for her performance as Christiane in Georges Franju's "Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face" (1960). It was two years before that Scob, still a student of French and drama at the Sorbonne, had begun appearing onstage, launching a remarkable theatrical career that would include cofounding a theater in the late 1960s with her husband, composer Georges Aperghis. Later she appeared in films by Luis Buñuel, Raúl Ruiz, Jacques Rivette, Andrzej Zutawskiand, Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Løve. Leos Carax cast Édith Scob in "Les amants du Pont-Neuf/The Lovers on the Bridge" (1991) and two decades later, he offered her the role of Céline, the close friend and chauffeur of Denis Lavant's mysterious Oscar in "Holy Motors" (2012).
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Alice began by studying piano at the Music Conservatory of Paris. Taking theater courses to overcome shyness, she quickly caught the drama bug.
She begins her film career in 2001 in the La bande du drugstore (2002) and Quatre copains (2001). She obtains one of the principal roles of Brocéliande (2003), plays in Le pharmacien de garde (2003) and Grande école (2004) in 2002.
The film The Story of My Life (2004) in 2003 gave her the recognition of the public. Alice next embarked on more prestigious productions of the year 2005. She was a pilot in Sky Fighters (2005), then acted in Le cactus (2005) and also acted with Gad Elmaleh in The Valet (2006) by Francis Veber.- Actress
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Jobert was born in 1940 in Algeria. She studied drama and fine art in Paris, made her acting debut on the stage in 1963 and secured her first film role in Louis Malle's The Thief of Paris (1967) in 1966. Her big break came with her casting as "Elisabeth" in Jean-Luc Godard's Masculine Feminine (1966), in which she performed alongside Brigitte Bardot and Jean-Pierre Léaud, and other high profile roles in star-studded casts followed. She gave a particularly powerful performance in Maurice Pialat's 1971 production, We Won't Grow Old Together (1972). Roles became rarer in the 1980s and Jobert increased her television and radio work by way of compensation.- Marcelle Romée was born on 7 February 1903 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France. She was an actress, known for The Letter (1931), Lilac (1932) and Une nuit à l'hôtel (1932). She died on 3 December 1932 in Chatou, Seine-et-Oise [now Yvelines], France.
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Véra Gibson-Amado, known professionally as Véra Clouzot, was a Brazilian-French actress.
In 1941, Véra met French actor Léo Lapara, a member of the theater company of Louis Jouvet, who toured in Brazil during World War II. Vera married the actor, taking part in the company's South American tour that lasted almost four years. After World War II, Vera settled in Paris.
In 1947, Lapara had a role in Jenny Lamour (1947) by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Vera met Henri on the set with her then-husband and it was described as "coup de foudre", love at first sight. Clouzot hired Vera as the script girl of his next film, Miquette (1950). Vera divorced Lapara and married Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1950. She was directed by her husband in her first film, the 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear (1953), in which she appeared alongside Charles Vanel and Yves Montand. In a short film career Clouzot only performed in films directed by Henri-Georges, the most famous of which was undoubtedly the 1955 thriller Diabolique (1955).
Vera died suddenly of a heart attack in 1960 just 15 days short of her 47th birthday.- Actress
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Nathalie Delon was born on 1 August 1941 in Oujda, French Protectorate Morocco [now Morocco]. She was an actress and writer, known for The Samurai (1967), They Call It an Accident (1982) and The French Dispatch (2021). She was married to Alain Delon and Guy Barthelemy. She died on 21 January 2021 in Paris, France.- Actress
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Marie Trintignant died tragically on the 1st of August, 2003 from a cerebral edema in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, France, following a violent fight with her boyfriend, Bertrand Cantat, lead singer in the French rock band, Noir Désir. She was just finishing filming a TV movie about Colette, directed by her mother.
Born into show business, she made her first screen appearance when she was just four-years-old but her breakthrough came in 1979 with the film "Série noire". In 1990, she had her first leading role in "Une nuit d'été en ville". Her second major role came in 1992 as "Betty", a bourgeois alcoholic. She also did theater work, notably "Le Retour", by Harold Pinter.
Her last film, Janis et John (2003), was completed three months before her death.- Actress
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Barbara Schulz was born on 15 March 1972 in Talence, Gironde, France. She is an actress and director, known for French Kiss (1995), The Longest Week (2014) and La dilettante (1999).- Actress
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Christine Pascal was born on 29 November 1953 in Lyon, Rhône, France. She was an actress and writer, known for The Little Prince Said (1992), Félicité (1979) and Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975). She was married to Robert Boner. She died on 30 August 1996 in Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, France.- Keltoume El Hanafi is known for The Disintegration (2011).
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Sophie Guillemin hesitated between becoming writer or photo reporter. A casting director changed her views and made her playing the heroine of a feature film: l'Ennui by Cedric Kahn, for which she has been nominated in the Cesar Academy Awards for the best promising actress. She played in several famous movies in France like A Friend like Harry for which she has been again nominated in the Cesar Academy Awards for the best promising actress, then she directed two shorts and a feature film, Sans Toi (Astray) released in France in 2022.- Marie-Christine Auferil is known for Les dossiers de Jérôme Randax (1965), À propos de la femme (1969) and En votre âme et conscience (1955).