She has just filmed a biopic in Belgium about Liliane Bettencourt, the billionaire behind the L’Oréal brand, and she was also seen on the stage of the Ruhrtriennale on Monday of this week. In the one-person play “Bérénice”, inspired by Jean Racine’s tragedy of the same name, the room belonged to her and her monologue for a hundred minutes. Such a workload is not an exception, but rather the norm. It is difficult to explain otherwise that at the age of 71, Isabelle Huppert can look back on more than 120 films with her in the lead role and a large number of theater productions.
Born in Paris in 1953, Huppert realised as a teenager that she felt in her element on stage. Her mother, an English teacher, enrolled her in acting classes. After school, Huppert attended the conservatory in Paris and took lessons from Jean-Laurent Cochet, who also taught Gérard Depardieu and Mélanie Thierry. But Huppert wanted to have Cochet expelled from school because she worked part-time and missed classes. He didn’t get his way, Huppert graduated and, blessed with talent, celebrated great success early on: in 1978, the Cannes Film Festival awarded her the Best Actress prize for her role in Claude Chabrol’s “Violette”, in which she played a young woman who tries to buy her way up the social ladder with theft and prostitution. Huppert worked with Nouvelle Vague director Chabrol, known for his socially critical films, seven more times. She later worked with Michael Haneke, François Ozon and Paul Verhoeven, among others, developing all of her characters into complex characters with a fine sense of irony.
She is now expected to be impartial in Venice, where festival director Alberto Barbera praised her effusively in advance: “As a muse to numerous great filmmakers, she has never shied away from accepting invitations from young and less famous directors who found her the ideal cast for their stories.”
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