French actress: Isabelle Huppert turns 70: Cinema doesn’t have to be nice

Isabelle Huppert is one of France’s most important and productive actresses. She plays because she has to – and she doesn’t shy away from any role.

In “Greta” she plays a dangerous psychopath, in “Elle” a middle-aged woman who is abused but does not call the police. And in “The Union Woman”, which will be released in German cinemas on April 27, she embodies an employee representative who is on the trail of dubious deals in the nuclear industry. Complex and dark roles. But cinema isn’t made to be nice, as Isabelle Huppert recently told fashion magazine L’Officiel.

Huppert, who turns 70 this Thursday (March 16), is one of the most important and productive actresses in France with around 150 television and cinema roles. Those she played on stage are not counted here.

Your enthusiasm for work is amazing. But acting isn’t work for her. When you enjoy making films that much, it goes beyond just work, she told CNews. Playing doesn’t require any effort from her.

Contradictory characters

Simultaneously passionate and distant, perverse and innocent, cold and sensual – contradictory roles that she particularly enjoys playing. Why? Because initially you don’t know what to think of them, because they only reveal themselves in the course of the story, she explained in the “CNews” interview.

Little is known about her personally. She was born in Paris on March 16, 1953 and comes from a wealthy family. Before she met Ronald Chammah, her husband and father of their three children, she was in a relationship with French film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier.

She has shared her life with director and producer Chammah for decades. She met the native Lebanese in 1982. A year later daughter Lolita was born, 1986 Lorenzo and 1997 Angelo. She shot the thriller “Milan noir” with her now 72-year-old husband.

She no longer knows how and why she got into acting, she said in an interview with “L’Officiel”. But the desire was there early on. She likes acting because it gives space to the imagination, she continued. And because it is a necessity for them. And so she took acting lessons at the age of 14.

Huppert began her career in the early 1970s. Already in her first roles she was characterized by this very personal mixture of impudence and distance, of daring and innocence, of coldness and sensuality. In “Monsieur Dupont” she played a young camper who is raped and murdered, in “Aloïse” a mentally ill woman who begins to write and paint in a psychiatric ward.

“The Lacemaker” and “Violette Nozière”

Her first major role came in 1977 with Claude Goretta in “The Lace Maker”, a story about a young hairdresser who is interned. Claude Chabrol made her internationally known with “Violette Nozière”. The film, about a teenage girl who works as a prostitute, won her the Best Actor Award at Cannes in 1978. She was only 25 years old then.

Her compatriot Chabrol, who died in 2010, offered her other important film roles. Sometimes devious, sometimes haughty, but always brilliant, whether as a woman who performs abortions, in “A Woman’s Matter”, as “Madame Bovary” or as a criminal postwoman in “Biester”. She also did occasional comedies, including 8 Women, Two Unlikely Sisters, and Copacabana.

From Tavernier to Chabrol, from Godard to Ozon and Chéreau, from Marco Ferreri to Andrzej Wajda and Michael Haneke, from David O’Russell and Wes Anderson to Paul Verhoeven: Huppert has shot with the greatest directors. On the theater stage she has worked with Peter Zadek, Bob Wilson and Yasmina Reza, among others.

Numerous awards

She was showered with prizes for best actress: twice she received the French César (“Beasts”, “Elle”), as well as the Silver Bear at the Berlinale (“8 Women”), in Cannes she was honored for “Violette Nozière” and “Die Pianist”, she received a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for “Elle”.

Slender, pale and only 1.52 tall: her frail appearance contrasts with her willpower. She knew very early on what role she wanted to play in her own life, she told the fashion magazine “Madame Figaro”: that of a woman who decides to realize herself and wants to be the first.

dpa

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