Best Known As: Star of Entre Nous and The Piano Teacher
Isabelle Huppert became one of France's busiest and most respected actresses in the late 20th century. She first gained fame in the 1974 sex farce Going Places as a ginger-haired teen seduced by Gerard Depardieu. (The film also jump-started Depardieu's career.) In 1978 she won the best actress award at Cannes for Violette Noziere, and she went on to make nearly five dozen more films before the year 2000. She has specialized in tales of emotionally repressed women: finding love and friendship with Miou-Miou in Entre Nous (1983), as a haunted abortionist in the controversial The Story of Women (1988), and as the erotically troubled tutor in The Piano Teacher (2001, based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek) among others. Huppert has appeared rarely in American films, most notably in Heaven's Gate (1980) and as Steve Guttenberg's mistress in The Bedroom Window (1987).
She was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1999... She has made many films with director Claude Chabrol.
Career Highlights: Entre Nous, The Piano Teacher, Violette Nozière
First Major Screen Credit: La Bar de la Fourche (1972)
Biography
One of the most enduring and respected actresses in French cinema, Isabelle Huppert is known for her versatile portrayals of characters ranging from the innocent to the sultry to the comic. Born March 16, 1955, in Paris, Huppert graduated from the Paris Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique and made her first film, Faustine et le Bel Été, when she was 16. Her career accelerated rapidly, and she soon found work with such acclaimed directors as Bertrand Blier, with whom she made Les Valseuses (1974), a film also notable for making a star out of Gérard Depardieu; Otto Preminger, for whom she appeared in Rosebud (1975); and Claude Chabrol, with whom she would make a series of films, starting with 1978's Violette Nozière, for which she won a Best Female Performance award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. Also in 1978, she won a British Academy Award for Best Newcomer for her role in La Dentellière (The Lacemaker).
Huppert's career in the 1980s commenced fairly inauspiciously, with a part in the legendary flop Heaven's Gate (1981), but it soon picked up with starring roles in Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon (1981), Jean-Luc Godard's Passion (1982), and Diane Kurys' celebrated Entre Nous (1983). Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Huppert made an impressive number of films in her native country, collaborating with Claude Chabrol on 1988's Une Affaire de Femmes (Story of Women), the widely acclaimed Madame Bovary (1991), and La Cérémonie (1995), for which she won a 1996 Best Actress César. Since the Heaven's Gate fiasco, Huppert's work in American film has been minimal, a worthwhile exception being her role as a nun-turned-nymphomaniac writer of pornographic fiction in Hal Hartley's Amateur (1994). In her native France, Huppert has become something of an institution, continuing to work prolifically on such films as Benoît Jacquot's L'École de la Chair (1998) and serving as the 24th president of the César Awards in March 1999.
Despite the fact that American audiences remained sadly unaware of Huppert's success overseas, her performances in Jacquot's False Servant and the historical drama Saint-Cyr (both 2000) found her meeting challenging roles head on to captivating effect. The sometimes disturbing films she appeared in may not have been the easiest for audiences to digest, but they certainly cemented her belief that the art of acting is a means of "living out one's insanity," and no matter what the subject matter or quality of the actual film, Huppert remained a consistently compelling screen presence. Huppert's success in Chabrol's Merci Pour le Chocolat (2000) came as no surprise to many given her successful track record with the enduring director, and the following year she would once again come under the international spotlight for her remarkable performance as a sexually repressed and self-destructive piano teacher in director Michael Haneke's confrontational drama The Piano Teacher (2001). Her fearless powerhouse performance shocked audiences worldwide and earned Huppert a Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was soon counterbalanced by director François Ozon's popular international black comedy 8 Women the following year. A campy, freewheeling musical mystery starring some of the biggest female stars in French cinema, the film came as an unexpected but infectious jolt of originality to audiences whose skin had been worn thin by a recent spat of heavy dramas.
Huppert's performance as an opinionated hooker who forms an unexpected bond with her illegitimate daughter in 2002's Ghost River benefited the touching drama well, and the following year, she was back with Haneke for the disturbing The Time of the Wolf. As with many of Haneke's films, The Time of the Wolf sharply divided audiences -- some of whom saw the film as celluloid perfection and others who viewed it as unrelentingly downbeat garbage. In 2003, Huppert would appear under the direction of an American director for the first time since 1994's Amateur with a role in Three Kings director David O. Russell's comedy I Heart Huckabees. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Isabelle Anne Madeleine Huppert
16 March 1955 (1955-03-16)(age 54) Paris, France
Years active
1972—present
Spouse(s)
Ronald Chammah (1982–present), 3 children
Isabelle Anne Madeleine Huppert (French pronunciation: [izabɛl yˈpɛʀ]; born 16 March 1955)[1][2] is a French actress, who has appeared in about 80 films including a few Hollywood movies. She is, by far, the actress who has had the most films (16) in the Cannes's official competition, and one of the four who have won the Best Interpretation Awards twice - for Violette Nozière in 1978 and La pianiste in 2001. She is also the most nominated actress for the Cesar Award. She has been nominated 13 times and she won a César Award for Best Actress in 1996 for her performance in La Cérémonie.
Huppert was born in Paris, the daughter of Annick Beau, a teacher of English, and Raymond Huppert, a safe manufacturer.[3][4] She was raised in Ville d'Avray, a western suburb of the city. Huppert was encouraged by her mother to begin acting at a young age, and became a teenage star in Paris. She later attended Versailles Conservatoire, where she won a prize for her acting. She is also an alumna of Europe's most prestigious National Conservatory of Dramatic Art of Paris, CNSAD. After a successful stage career, she began making films, debuting in 1972 with Faustine et le bel été (her television debut was a year earlier). However it was her appearance in the controversial Les Valseuses (1974) that made her increasingly recognised to the wider public. Her international breakthrough, finally, came with La Dentelliere (1977), in which her now signature acting style - quiet and nuanced, yet intense - was displayed to great effect. She made her American debut in Michael Cimino's 1980 film Heaven's Gate, which was a notorious flop at the U.S. box office, but has since been re-released in the director's full version. In the '80s, Huppert continued to explore enigmatic and emotionally distant characters, most notably in Maurice Pialat's 'Loulou' (1980), Godard's 'Sauve qui peut (la vie)' (1980), Diane Kurys' 'Coup de foudre' (1983), and Claude Chabrol's 'Une Affaire de Femmes' (1988).
Later career and recent credits
Huppert played a manic and homicidal post-office worker in Claude Chabrol'sLa Cérémonie (1995), with Sandrine Bonnaire, and continued her cinematic relationship with that director in 'Rien ne va plus' (1997), and 'Merci pour le Chocolat' (2000). She also appeared in Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (2001), which is based on a novel of the same name (Die Klavierspielerin) by Austrian author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, Elfriede Jelinek. In this film, she played a piano teacher named Erika Kohut, who becomes involved with a young pianist and ladies' man, Walter Klemmer. Regarded as one of her most impressive turns, her performance netted the 2001 acting prize in Cannes. In 2004, she starred in Christophe Honoré's Ma mère as Hélène with Louis Garrel. Here, Huppert plays an attractive middle-aged mother who has an incestuous relationship with her teenaged son. Ma mère was also based on a novel, by George Bataille.
In 2005, she toured the United States in a Royal Court Theatre production of Sarah Kane's theatrical piece, 4.48 Psychosis. This production was directed by Claude Regy and performed in French. She chose to remain still throughout the entire performance, moving only her hands and face, much of the time with tears streaming down her cheeks.
In Europe and the art house world, Huppert is venerated as an institution.
Huppert most recently received an award for her part in The Piano Teacher. Huppert is also an alumna of the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art of Paris, CNSAD.
In 2008 she received the Stanislavsky Award for outstanding achievement in acting, and devotion to the principles of the Stanislavsky method.
She was made Chevalier (Knight) of the Ordre national du Mérite on 8 December 1994[8] and was promoted to Officier (Officer) in 2005.[8]
She was made Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur on 29 September 1999[9] and was promoted to Officier (Officer) in 2009.[9]
Reviews
David Thomson on Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary: "[Huppert] has to rate as one of the most accomplished actresses in the world today, even if she seems short of the passion or agony of her contemporary, Isabelle Adjani". Stuart Jeffries of The Observer on The Piano Teacher: "This is surely one of the greatest performances of Huppert's already illustrious acting career, though it is one that is very hard to watch." Director, Michael Haneke: "[Huppert] has such professionalism, the way she is able to represent suffering. At one end you have the extreme of her suffering and then you have her icy intellectualism. No other actor can combine the two."[10]
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