Marie Trintignant was born on 21st January 1962 in Paris, the daughter of internationally acclaimed actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and film director Nadine Trintignant.  She made her film debut at the age of 4 in Mon amour, mon amour (1967), which was directed by her mother.  As a child, her ambition was to become a veterinary surgeon, but at 16 she finally decided on an acting career.

With Alain Corneau’s black comedy Série noire, Marie Trintignant had her first substantial film role, playing the kind of character for which she would be most remembered – a vulnerable outsider, scarred by a brutal existence.   After a number of small roles in the 1980s (notably in Ettore Scola’s La Terrasse ), she went on to make her mark in a number of films, whilst pursuing a theatrical career (often appearing alongside her father). 

In one of her most challenging roles, in Claude Chabrol’s Betty (1991), Marie Trintignant had the opportunity to impress both her beauty and talent on French cinema audiences.  She followed this with a series of equally impressive performances in a number of high profile films (for cinema and television), alternating comedy and drama.  These include three films for Pierre Salvadori (Cible émouvante , Les Apprentis and Comme elle respire ), Yvon Marciano’s Le Cri de la soie and Alain Corneau’s Le Cousin.  She was nominated for five Césars in the course of her career (but was not awarded a prize).  To each of her performances, Marie Trintignant was able to bring a tortured humanity and inner complexity which rendered her controversial creations simultaneously sympathetic, believable and often very disturbing.  Her distinctive rough voice became one of her trademarks and was employed to great effect in the popular animated film, Corto Maltese (2002). 

Tragically, Marie Trintignant’s career was cut short in the summer of 2003 with a brutality and injustice which surpassed anything she portrayed on screen.  At the time, she was filming a TV drama entitled Colette (in which she took the role of the reactionary writer) in Lithuania, under the direction of her mother.  After a violent argument with her boyfriend Bertrand Cantat (singer in the French rock band Noir Désir), she was knocked unconscious and fell into a coma.  Despite an operation to save her life, she died from a brain haemorrhage on 1st August 2003.  Aged 41, she left behind 4 young sons (aged between 5 and 17). 

© James Travers 2003