Isabelle Huppert Biography (1955)

Early Career And Acclaim

Huppert developed an interest in acting as a teenager and entered the Versailles Conservatory in 1968. Three years later, at age 16, she made her film debut in Faustine et le bel été (1971; Faustine and the Beautiful Summer). Though cast in a bit part, she attracted notice and began working steadily; by the mid-1970s she had made more than 15 films. It was not until 1977, however, that she received international acclaim. In La Dentellière (The Lacemaker) her portrayal of Pomme, a young woman who suffers a nervous breakdown after being abandoned by her lover, earned Huppert the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award as most promising newcomer. The following year she was named best actress at the Cannes film festival for her performance in Violette Nozière (1978) as a teenager who casually murders her father; it was the first of seven films she made with director Claude Chabrol. In 1980 Huppert appeared in her first English-language film, Heaven’s Gate, a Western that was panned by critics and ignored by audiences.

Versatility In The 1990s And 2000s

Although she was a versatile actress, adept in both comedic and serious roles, Huppert’s forte was playing antiheroines with questionable morals. In Chabrol’s film adaptation (1991) of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, she played the tragic Emma Bovary, an unhappy middle-class wife whose adulterous affairs eventually lead to her suicide. For her performance Huppert received some of the most notable reviews of her career. In 1994 she starred as a nun turned pornographer in Amateur. The following year she portrayed a town gossip and murderer in La Cerémonie, for which she received a French César Award. She later played a career woman dating a young bartender in L’École de la chair (1998; The School of Flesh). In 2001 Huppert garnered acclaim as a sexually repressed music instructor in La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher). The disturbing drama, which was directed by Michael Haneke, earned Huppert her second best actress award at Cannes. She turned to comedy with 8 femmes (2002; 8 Women), about a group of women (played by Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, and Fanny Ardant, among others) who investigate a murder.

Huppert’s subsequent films included I Heart Huckabees (2004), a comedy about detectives who solve their clients’ existential problems; Gabrielle (2005), which chronicles the demise of a marriage; and L’Ivresse du pouvoir (2006; The Comedy of Power), in which she starred as a judge who heads an investigation into corporate corruption. In 2008 Huppert appeared as a plantation owner in French Indochina in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (2008; The Sea Wall), an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s novel of the same name. She was at the centre of another exploration of colonialism’s effects in White Material (2009), in which she portrayed a French farmer defending her coffee plantation from rebels in an unnamed African country. In Tarŭn naraesŏ (2012; In Another Country), a series of related vignettes set in South Korea, Huppert starred as three different women dealing with romantic entanglements, and in Haneke’s Amour (2012) she had a supporting role as the daughter of an elderly couple facing mortality.