Marion Cotillard

Marion Cotillard

Actor
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Life Story

Academy Award-winning actress Marion Cotillard was born on September 30, 1975 in Paris. Cotillard is the daughter of Jean-Claude Cotillard, an actor, playwright and director, and Niseema Theillaud, an actress and drama teacher. Her father's family is Breton.

Raised in Orléans, France, she made her acting debut as a child with a role in one of her father's plays. She studied drama at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique in Orléans. After small appearances and performances in theater, Cotillard had occasional and minor roles in TV series such as Highlander (1992) and Extrême limite (1994), but her career as a film actress began in the mid-1990s. While still a teenager, Cotillard made her cinema debut at the age of 18 in the film L'histoire du garçon qui voulait qu'on l'embrasse (1994), and had small but noticeable roles in films such as Arnaud Desplechin's My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (1996) and Coline Serreau's comedy La belle verte (1996).

In 1996, she had her first lead role in the TV film Chloé (1996), playing the title role - a teenage runaway who is forced into prostitution. Cotillard co-starred opposite Anna Karina, the muse of the Nouvelle Vague.

In 1997, she won her first film award at the Festival Rencontres Cinématographiques d'Istres in France, for her performance as the young imprisoned Nathalie in the short film Affaire classée (1997). Her first prominent screen role was Lilly Bertineau in Gérard Pirès's box-office hit Taxi (1998), a role which she reprised in two sequels: Taxi 2 (2000) and Taxi 3 (2003), this role earned her first César award nomination (France's equivalent to the Oscar) for Most Promising Actress in 1999.

In 1999, Cotillard starred as Julie Bonzon in the Swiss war drama War in the Highlands (1998). For her performance in the film, she won the Best Actress award at the Autrans Film Festival in France. In 2001, Marion starred in Pretty Things (2001) as the twin sisters Marie and Lucie, and was nominated for her second César award for Most Promising Actress.

Cotillard's breakthrough in France came in 2003, when she starred in Yann Samuell's dark romantic comedy Love Me If You Dare (2003), in which she played Sophie Kowalsky, the daughter of Polish immigrants who lives a love-hate relationship with her childhood friend. The film was a box-office hit in France, became a cult film abroad and led Cotillard to bigger projects.

Her first Hollywood movie was Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003), in which she played Joséphine, the wife of William Bloom (played by Billy Crudup). A few years later, Marion starred in Ridley Scott's A Good Year (2006) playing Fanny Chenal, a French café owner who falls in love with Russell Crowe's character. In 2004, she won the Chopard Thophy of Female Revelation at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2005, Cotillard won the César award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance of Tina Lombardi in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement (2004).

 
Family

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Trivia

If she had not been an actress, she would have liked to become a singer.
Her name is pronounced "mah-ree-ohn ko-tee-ar".
Had to learn how to sing in one month to play Marie in Pretty Things (2001). Also co-wrote and performed the song "La Fille de Joie" and performed the song "La Conne" for this film.
Her onscreen debut was in 1993 at the age of 17, in the Canadian TV Series Highlander (1992). She had an uncredited cameo as the girl who gives birth in the episode 17 of Season 1: "Saving Grace". She then returned in the episode 21: "Nowhere to Run", as Lori Bellian. It was also her first English-speaking role.
She's an ecologist. Member and Spokesperson for Greenpeace since 2002. She is also one of several actors, singers and designers involved in "Dessins pour le Climat" ("Drawings for the Climate"), a book of drawings originated by Greenpeace and Glénat, available for sale beginning April 2005 (all proceeds to go to Greenpeace).
Played Joan of Arc in the concert "Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher" (Joan of Arc at the Stake) several times: in 2005 in Orléans, France; in 2012 in Barcelona, Spain; in 2015 in Monaco, Toulouse and Paris, France and in New York. Her mother also played Joan of Arc in the same concert in 1992.
Born to Jean-Claude Cotillard, an actor and teacher, and his wife Niseema Theillaud, also an actress and drama teacher.
Has two younger brothers: Guillaume and Quentin, they are identical twins (born on 6 November 1977). Guillaume Cotillard, is a screenwriter and director and Quentin Cotillard works as a sculptor, living in San Francisco, California with his Irish-American wife Elaine O'Malley Cotillard, a former Dutch National Ballet dancer and fashion designer.
She never had her ears pierced.
Grew up in Orléans and moved to Paris at the age of 16.
Cousin of Laurent Cotillard.
Is the Godmother of Costa Serena and inaugurated the ship in Marseille, France on May 19, 2007.
Best friends are Cécile Cassel, Élodie Navarre, Mélanie Laurent, Geraldine Seguin and Gilles Lellouche.
Companion of her Love Me If You Dare (2003) co-star Guillaume Canet since October 2007. They met in 1997 but only grew closer 10 years later.
Having won the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar for La Vie En Rose (2007) on 24 February 2008, she has become the second French actress to do so. The other one is Simone Signoret for Room at the Top (1959). Claudette Colbert, who won in 1934 for It Happened One Night (1934), was French-born, but raised in the U.S. and considered herself American. Cotillard is also the second French actress to win a BAFTA and an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for the same performance. Simone Signoret was the first to win both awards with her performance in Room at the Top (1959). Simone Signoret's daughter, Catherine Allégret, portrayed Édith Piaf's grandmother, Louise Gassion, in "La Vie en Rose".

 

Personal Quotes 

[on acting] I don't think you learn how to act. You learn how to use your emotions and feelings, and my first teacher was my mother [Niseema Theillaud] and then I worked with my father [Jean-Claude Cotillard], who helped me to find in myself all those emotions and how to play with the emotions.
[on accepting the best actress Oscar for La Vie En Rose (2007) (aka "La Vie en Rose")] Thank you life, thank you love, and - it is true - there [are] some angels in this city [Los Angeles].
Did a man really walk on the moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don't believe all they tell me, that's for sure.
[on her French accent] The first thing I have to do to erase my French accent is think that it is actually possible, whereas for the moment, I think it's not. I have a lot of work.
My parents always told me that if you want something, you can do whatever you have to do to get it. As long as it's not against someone else.
I have a tendency to often share the point of view of the conspiracy theory.
[on extreme characters] I do like extreme characters, but I think they are extreme because they are full of passion - they are rich inside. Tina Lombardi [from A Very Long Engagement (2004)] was such a beautiful character. What I love in her is that she's not a cliché of the femme fatale. She's just a girl who loves her man and feels desperate about losing him. It's not just about revenge. She is in that huge country, searching for something. She's lost, destroyed inside.
[on the beginning of her career as a child] I started in musicals when I was very young. Both my parents are stage actors, and I was fascinated by their jobs. My father was a mime. When I was 5, a director friend of my family put me in his movie. I played a little girl with a dog, but I remember my scenes and I was entranced by acting. It was a dream to me - the passion of the profession was contagious.
The first English-language movie I saw might have been E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). I remember I was so into it, I cried so loud that the audience around me wanted to take me out of the theater.
[on her Public Enemies (2009) character] She's a real product of this really tough period in American history. Out of the Depression came all of these people who struggled to live. Billie had no money, and she came from an Indian tribe, which, at the time, was not easy. By the time she came to Chicago and met Dillinger, she had already lived several lives - she had been to military boarding school, to learn military manners, to "get the Indian out." She's a mix of someone really sweet and tough.
When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be in a musical, an American musical. I knew Singin' in the Rain (1952) by heart.
I think that when you don't see the boundaries, you cross them without even knowing they exist in the first place.
I need to feel that for a director it's a matter of life and death; he needs to tell this story.
I adore my own life, more and more I love being myself, but I love this work of totally changing personalities, of creating something radically different from myself. I want to go profoundly into my roles. If not, what's the point?
[on Rust and Bone (2012) in which she plays a woman who has lost both legs in an accident] In the beginning of the film she is empty, she doesn't know who she is or why she;'s alive. She is numb. It's as if she were drugged. I have never experimented with hard drugs, but I've been at certain moments of my life in a state of shock close to something where you lose your footing, your sense of reality. I think that's the gift of the actor, the ability to put ourselves in a state.

 

 
Filmography

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