Isabelle Anne Madeleine Huppert is a French actress of stage and screen who
has appeared in more than 100 film and television productions since her 1971
debut. She won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer for The Lacemaker and
the César Award for Best Actress for La Ceremonie. She is the most nominated
actress for the César Award, with 14 nominations. She was made a Chevalier of
the Legion of Honour in 1999 and was promoted to Officer in 2009.
Huppert's first César nomination was for the 1975 film Aloïse. She went on to win
Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for Violette Nozière and The Piano
Teacher and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for
Story of Women and La Ceremonie. Her other films include Loulou, La
Séparation, 8 Women, Gabrielle and Amour. Her English-language films
include Heaven's Gate, I Heart Huckabees and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.
A five-time Molière Award nominee in France, she made her London stage debut
in the title role of the play Mary Stuart in 1996, and her New York stage
debut in a 2005 production of 4.48 Psychosis. She returned to the New York
stage in 2014, to star opposite Cate Blanchett in a Sydney Theatre Company
production of The Maids. Early life and career
Huppert was born in Paris, the daughter of Annick Beau, a teacher of English,
and Raymond Huppert, a safe manufacturer. Her father was born Jewish
and converted to Catholicism; he was descended from immigrants from Hungary.
She was raised in a western suburb of Ville-d'Avray. 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 the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art of
Paris, CNSAD. Huppert made her film debut in 1972 with
Faustine et le bel été, though her television debut was in 1971. Her later
appearance in the controversial Les Valseuses made her increasingly
recognized by the public. Her international breakthrough came with La
Dentelliere, for which she won a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer to
Leading Film Roles. She made her American film debut in Michael Cimino's
1980 film Heaven's Gate, which was a notorious flop at the U.S. box office.
Throughout the 1980s, Huppert continued to explore enigmatic and emotionally
distant characters, most notably in Maurice Pialat's Loulou, Godard's Sauve
qui peut, Diane Kurys' Coup de foudre, and Claude Chabrol's Une Affaire de
Femmes. Later career and recent credits
Huppert played a manic and homicidal post-office worker in Claude Chabrol's
La Cérémonie, with Sandrine Bonnaire, and continued her cinematic relationship
with Chabrol in Rien ne va plus, and Merci pour le chocolat. She also
appeared in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, which is based on a novel of
the same name by Austrian author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 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 teenage son. Ma
Mère was based on a novel by Georges Bataille. 2004 also saw her star
opposite Dustin Hoffman in David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees.
Huppert is also an acclaimed stage actress, receiving five Molière Award
nominations, including for the title role in a 2001 Paris production of
Medea, directed by Jacques Lassalle, and at the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe in
Paris, in the title role of a 2005 production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.
Later that year, 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 Régy and performed in French.
Isabelle Huppert was the President of the Jury at the 62nd Cannes Film
Festival, from 13 May to 24 May 2009. She has been Member of the Jury and
Master of Ceremony in previous years, as well as winning the Best Actress Award
twice. As president, she gave the Palme d'Or to The White Ribbon by the Austrian
director Michael Haneke who has directed her in The Piano Teacher and Time of the
Wolf. Huppert starred in the 11th season
finale of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit which aired on 19 May 2010.
In September 2010, the Philippine Daily Inquirer announced that she had been
cast in the film Captive by award-winning Filipino director
Brillante Mendoza. Huppert played the role of a kidnap victim in the hands of
the separatist group, Abu Sayyaf. In 2012, she starred in two films that
competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival; Amour and In
Another Country. In 2013, she co-starred in Sydney
Theatre Company's The Maids by Jean Genet, with Cate Blanchett and Elizabeth
Debicki and directed by Benedict Andrews in a new English translation by Andrews
and Andrew Upton. Then in summer of 2014, the production toured in New York
as a part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2014, in New York City Center for 13
performances. Awards
She has been nominated fourteen times for a César Award, winning it in 1996
for her work in La Cérémonie. She is one of only four women who have
twice won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival: in 1978 for her role in
Violette Nozière by Claude Chabrol and in 2001 for The Piano Teacher by Michael
Haneke. She is also one of only two women who
have twice received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film
Festival: in 1988 for her part in Une affaire de femmes, and in 1995 for La
Cérémonie. Both films were directed by Claude Chabrol. Additionally, she
received a Special Lion in 2005 for her role in Gabrielle.
Huppert was twice voted Best Actress at the European Film Awards: in 2001 for
playing Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, and in 2002 with the entire
cast of 8 Women. The latter cast also won a Silver Bear for Outstanding
Artistic Contribution, at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival. She
won the Best Actress award at the Montreal World Film Festival, at the
Moscow International Film Festival, at the Deutscher Filmpreis and twice at the
David di Donatello. 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 of the Ordre
national du Mérite on 8 December 1994 and was promoted to Officier in 2005.
She was made Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur on 29 September 1999 and was
promoted to Officier in 2009. = César Awards=
= BAFTA Film Awards= = Film festivals=
= Molière Awards= = Other=
= Honorary awards= 2006: Ibsen Centennial Commemoration
Award 2008: 30th Moscow International Film
Festival Stanislavsky Award 2009: Karlovy Vary International Film
Festival Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema
2013: Manaki Brothers Film Festival Special Golden Camera 300
2014: Munich Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award
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." Of her performance in 2011's Hidden Love, Roger Ebert said
"Isabelle Huppert makes one good film after another.... she is fearless.
Directors often depend on her gift for conveying depression, compulsion,
egotism and despair. She can be funny and charming, but then so can a lot of
actors. She is in complete command of a face that regards the void with
blankness." In 2010, S.T. VanAirsdale described her as "arguably the world’s
greatest screen actress". Filmography
Discography Madame Deshoulières with Jean-Louis
Murat. Personal life
Huppert has been married to writer, producer and director Ronald Chammah
since 1982. They have three children including the actress Lolita Chammah
with whom she acted in the film Copacabana.
References External links
Isabelle Huppert at the Internet Movie Database
Isabelle Huppert at AllMovie Isabelle Huppert at filmsdefrance.com