Isabelle Huppert - biography

One of the most high-profile and talented of actresses in France today, Isabelle Huppert has enjoyed an astonishingly successful film career.  She is as renowned for her portrayals of fragile, wide-eyed innocents as for her roles as devious, strong-willed vamps.  Her performances are both mesmerising and convincing, often to the extent that the spectator is drawn helplessly into the drama, hooked by an uncanny empathy with the actress.

Isabelle Huppert was born in Paris on 16th March 1955, the youngest of four children in a stable middle class family.  After a model school career, she decided, with her parents’ support, to become an actress.  Shortly after entering the Conservatory of dramatic art in Paris at the age of 17, she made her first film appearance, a walk-on part in Faustine et le bel été (1972).   She was also making television appearance, again minor parts, but it was not until she appeared in Claude Sautet’s 1972 film, César et Rosalie, (playing Romy Schneider’s younger sister) that she was noticed. 

Appearances in two subsequent films consolidated Huppert’s popularity and ensured stardom would follow.  These were Bertrand Blier’s cult film, Les Valseuses (1974) (which also launched the careers of two other promising young actors, Patrick Dewaere and Gérard Depardieu), and Bertrand Tavernier’s critically acclaimed Le Juge et l’assassin (1975). 

After appearing in another half a dozen or so films, Huppert soon achieved celebrity and the unanimous praise of critics for her role in La Dentellière (a.k.a. The Lace Maker) in 1977, for which she won a César.  The following year, she won best actress award at the Cannes film festival for her part in Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière.  Instantly, she was loved by the cinema-going public, critics and film-makers alike.  In addition to her many collaborations with Claude Chabrol, she would work with some of the great French film directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat and Michel Deville.

In 1980, Huppert left her native France to work for the first time in Hollywood, on Michael Cimino’s now notorious film Heaven’s Gate.  This was not a pleasant experience for the actress (she was forbidden to speak French on the set) and the film was a staggering commercial failure.  Huppert made a hasty return to France and redeemed herself with excellent performances in Tavernier’s Coup de torchon and Deville’s Eaux profondes (1981). 

Throughout the 1980s, Huppert’s popularity would grow as the actress matured and took on a wider variety of roles.  Her most acclaimed performances can be seen in Diane Kurys’ Coup de foudre (1983), in which she starred with Miou-Miou, La Garce (1984), opposite Richard Berry, and Chabrol’s moving war-time tale, Une affaire de femmes (1988).

By the late 1980s, Huppert had safely established herself as the leading French film actress, a position she would occupy for the next decade.  At the same time, her international reputation grew and she accepted work abroad (mainly in Italy and America), although it is to French cinema to which she remained most attached.  During this period, her best appearances are to be found in Christian Vincent’s touching 1994 drama La Séparation (opposite Daniel Auteuil) and Claude Chabrol’s popular thriller, La Cérémonie (1995), in which she played a psychotic, psychopathic post mistress.  In 1991, she also played Flaubert’s lovelorn tragic heroine in Chabrol’s film Madame Bovary, again to great acclaim.

Entering a new decade, Huppert’s popularity shows no signs of diminishing.  Her formidable appearance as Madame de Maintenon, mistress to King Louis XIV, in the historical film Saint-Cyr earned her a nomination (but not the award) for best actress at the 2001 Césars.  Isabelle Huppert looks like remaining a fixture of French cinema for many years to come.

© James Travers 2002
Version française

To find out more about Isabelle Huppert, visit: http://www.isabellehuppert.com

“Acting is a way of living out one’s insanity.”

“But theatre is always a difficult experience.”

“Firstly I did it in this huge theatre in Avignon, then to smaller places, then bigger places.  You have to change the volume of the voice, give more or less.  The way you have to relate to space makes it like sculpture.”

“For an actress there is no greater gift than having a camera in front of you, listening to the most beautiful music in the world and just being looked at!”

“For me, making films is like being on vacation, it’s a nice walk.  But theatre is like mountaineering.  You never know whether you’re going to fall off or make it to the top.”

“I don’t know if you ever say to yourself that you want to be an actress.  It eventually becomes a social function - you are an actress and you make a living out of it, but at the beginning it’s more a matter of how to survive, or how to exist in a certain way.”

“I never wondered whether I should be a stage actress or a movie actress.”

“I think being an actress is more how to cope with the fact that you can’t do anything else than to express a talent.  It’s a way of being untalented for anything.”

“The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character - that is the purpose of films and theatre.”

“Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn’t want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen.  There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else.”

“My mom’s a Catholic, and my dad’s a Jew, and they didn’t want anything to do with anything.”

“But it wasn’t just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.”

“Even for the most difficult scenes, and there are difficult scenes in the film, and because Michael Haneke is such a great film-maker - I think a great film-maker is not only being inspired, but how to do it, how to make it as real as possible, knowing that it’s not real.”

“Once you have made the decision to do the film, once you have identified the desire and all the deep and personal, intimate, artistic reasons why you want to do the film, then it’s more a matter of how to do things.”

“When you come to do the film, it is not the time to wonder why you do it.  It’s just how to do it.”

“Before I do a play I say that I hope it’s going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure.  One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again.  It’s like a drug.”

“For a long time I have compared cinema to music, I think cinema has a lot to do with the rhythm of music.”

“Going through this musical experience really helped us to understand the core of the film.”

“But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.”

“I did a film very quickly, and then a lot of work for television, and then I did stage work.”

“It really helps you to go through difficult situations by just thinking about it as being a big amount of work which you have to solve how to do.  For example, I don’t feel very inspired when I act, I just act.  That’s it.”

“But on the whole, nothing requires unbearable energy for me, it’s just a normal thing.”

“I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal.”

“In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field.  Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn’t mingle them.  Now it’s more ambiguous.”

“Perhaps Europeans are a bit more skeptic whereas Americans are more believers.”

Isabelle Huppert has appeared in the following films:
Faustine et le bel été (1972)
César et Rosalie (1972)
Le Bar de la fourche (1972)
Les Valseuses (1974)
Aloise (1974)
Die Große Ekstase (1975)
Dupont-Lajoie (1975)
Docteur Françoise Gailland (1975)
Rosebud (1975)
Sérieux comme le plaisir (1975)
Le Juge et l’assassin (1976)
Les Indiens sont encore loin (1977)
La Dentellière (1977)
Violette Nozière (1978)
Les Soeurs Brontë (1979)
Retour à la bien-aimée (1979)
Scénario de ’Sauve qui peut la vie’ (1979)
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980)
Örökség (1980)
Loulou (1980)
Heaven’s Gate (1980)
La Dame aux camélias (1980)
Eaux profondes (1981)
Coup de torchon (1981)
Les Ailes de la colombe (1981)
La Truite (1982)
Passion (1982)
Coup de foudre (1983)
Storia di Piera (1983)
La Femme de mon pote (1983)
La Garce (1984)
Signé Charlotte (1985)
Sac de noeuds (1985)
Cactus (1986)
Milan noir (1987)
The Bedroom Window (1987)
Les Possédés (1988)
Une affaire de femmes (1988)
La Vengeance d’une femme (1990)
Contre l’oubli (1991)
Malina (1991)
Madame Bovary (1991)
Après l’amour (1992)
Navodneniye (1994)
Amateur (1994)
La Séparation (1994)
Lumière et compagnie (1995)
La Cérémonie (1995)
Le Affinità elettive (1996)
Les Palmes de M. Schutz (1997)
Rien ne va plus (1997)
L’École de la chair (1998)
Pas de scandale (1999)
La Vie moderne (2000)
Saint-Cyr (2000)
Comédie de l’innocence (2000)
Les Destinées sentimentales (2000)
La Fausse suivante (2000)
Merci pour le chocolat (2000)
La Pianiste (2001)
8 femmes (2002)
La Vie promise (2002)
Deux (2002)
Le Temps du loup (2003)
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Les Soeurs fâchées (2004)
Ma mère (2004)
Gabrielle (2005)
L’Ivresse du pouvoir (2006)
Nue propriété (2006)
L’Amour caché (2007)
Médée miracle (2007)
Les Médiateurs (2008)
Home (2008)
Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (2009)
Des parents formidables (2009)
Villa Amalia (2009)
White Material (2010)
Copacabana (2010)
Sans queue ni tête (2010)
My Little Princess (2011)
Mon pire cauchemar (2011)