Isabelle Adjani

Isabelle Yasmina Adjani was born on 27 June 1955 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, to Mohammed Cherif Adjani, an Algerian Kabyle from Constantine, and Emma Augusta "Gusti" Schweinberger, a German Catholic from Bavaria.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

Adjani's parents met near the end of World War II, when her father was in the French Army. They married and her mother returned with him to Paris, despite not speaking a word of French.[8][9] She asked him to take Cherif as his first name as she thought it sounded more "American".[10]

Isabelle grew up bilingual, speaking French and German fluently,[11][12][13] in Gennevilliers, a northwestern suburb of Paris, where her father worked in a garage.[14] After winning a school recitation contest, Adjani began acting by the age of 12 in amateur theater. She successfully passed her baccalauréat and was auditing classes at the University of Vincennes in 1976.[3]

Adjani had a younger brother, Éric, who was a photographer. He died on 25 December 2010, aged 53.[15][16]

Adjani at the 35th César Awards, 27 February 2010

Adjani at the Hôtel Amour, 2012

At the age of 14, Adjani starred in her first motion picture, Le Petit Bougnat (1970).[17] She first gained fame as a classical actress at the Comédie-Française, which she joined in 1972. She was praised for her interpretation of Agnès, the main female role in Molière's L'École des femmes. She soon left the theatre to pursue a film career.

After minor roles in several films, she enjoyed modest success in the 1974 film La Gifle (The Slap), which François Truffaut saw. He immediately cast her in her first major role in his The Story of Adèle H. (1975) which he had finished writing five years prior. Critics praised her performance,[3] with the American critic Pauline Kael describing her acting talents as "prodigious".[18]

Only 19 when she made the film, Adjani was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, becoming the youngest Best Actress nominee at the time (a record she held for almost 30 years). She quickly received offers for roles in Hollywood films, such as Walter Hill's 1978 crime thriller The Driver. She had previously turned down the chance to star in films like The Other Side of Midnight. She had described Hollywood as a "city of fiction" and said, "I'm not an American. I didn't grow up with that will to win an award." Truffaut on the other hand said, "France is too small for her. I think Isabelle is made for American cinema."[3] She agreed to make The Driver because she was an admirer of Hill's first film Hard Times. Adjani said:

I think he is wonderful, very much in the tradition of Howard Hawks, lean and spare. The story is contemporary but also very stylized, and the roles that Ryan and I play are like Bogart and Bacall. We are both gamblers in our souls and we do not show our emotions or say a lot. For us, talk is cheap. I am really quite a mysterious girl in this film, with no name and no background. And I must say that it is restful not to have a life behind me; this way, I don't have to dig deep to play the part. All I know is that life for me is gambling and I am a loser. I have what people call a poker face.[19]

The film was seen more than 1.1 million times in Adjani's native France but did not do as well in the US.[20]

She played Lucy in the German director Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of Nosferatu which was well-received critically and performed well at box offices in Europe.[21] Roger Ebert loved the film, calling Herzog's casting of Adjani one of his "masterstrokes" in the film. He wrote that she "is used here not only for her facial perfection but for her curious quality of seeming to exist on an ethereal plane."[22] The cast and the crew filmed both English- and German-language versions simultaneously upon request of 20th Century Fox, the American distributor,[23] as Kinski and Ganz could act more confidently in their native language.

In 1981, she received a double Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress award for her roles in the Merchant Ivory film Quartet, based on the novel by Jean Rhys, and in the horror film Possession (1981). The following year, she received her first César Award for Possession, in which she had portrayed a woman having a nervous breakdown. In 1983, she won her second César for her depiction of a vengeful woman in the French blockbuster One Deadly Summer. That same year, Adjani released the French pop album Pull marine, written and produced by Serge Gainsbourg. She starred in a music video for the hit title song, "Pull Marine", which was directed by Luc Besson.

In 1988, she co-produced and starred in a biopic of the sculptor Camille Claudel. She received her third César and second Oscar nomination for her role in the film, becoming the first French actress to receive two Oscar nominations. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

She received her fourth César for the 1994 film Queen Margot, an ensemble epic directed by Patrice Chéreau. She received her fifth César for Skirt Day (2009), the most that any actress has received. The film features her as a middle school teacher in a troubled French suburb who takes her class hostage when she accidentally fires off a gun she found on one of her students. It was premiered on the French Arte channel on 20 March 2009, attaining a record 2.2 million viewers) and then in movie theaters on 25 March 2009.[24] The film was her return to the cinema after eight years of absence.[25] In 2010, she made an appearance in the social comedy Mammuth, from directors Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, and in which she played the phantom of Gérard Depardieu's first love.[26] The same year, she lent her voice to the character of Mother Gothel in the animated film Rapunzel.[27] In 2011, she co-starred in De Force, the first film directed by Frank Henry. She embodied the commander Clara Damico, head of the brigade for the repression of banditry.[28]

In 1979, Adjani had a son, Barnabé Saïd-Nuytten, with the cinematographer Bruno Nuytten,[11] whom she later hired to direct her project Camille Claudel, a biopic of the sculptor who was best known as the lover of Rodin.[14]

From 1989 to 1995, she had a relationship with Daniel Day-Lewis,[11] which ended before the birth of their son, Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis, in 1995.[29]

Adjani was later engaged to the composer Jean-Michel Jarre; they broke up in 2004.[29]

In addition to specific awards for particular films, Adjani was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur on 14 July 2010 for her contributions to the arts.[33]

• Maghrebian community of Paris
• List of oldest and youngest Academy Award winners and nominees – Youngest nominees for Best Actress in a Leading Role
• List of actors with Academy Award nominations
• List of French Academy Award winners and nominees

• Adjani, Isabelle (1980). Isabelle Adjani in : Jean-Luc Douin (Hrsg.): Comédiennes aujourd'hui : au micro et sous le regard. Paris: Lherminier. ISBN 2-86244-020-5
• Austin, Guy (2003). Foreign bodies: Jean Seberg and Isabelle Adjani, S. 91–106 in: ders., Stars in Modern French Film. London: Arnold. ISBN 0-340-76019-2
• Austin, Guy (2006). Telling the truth can be a dangerous business : Isabelle Adjani, race and stardom, in : Remapping World Cinema : Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, herausgegeben von Stephanie Dennison und Song Hwee Lim, London: Wallflower Press. ISBN 1-904764-62-2
• Halberstadt, Michèle (2002). Adjani aux pieds nus – Journal de la repentie. Paris: Editions Calmann-Lévy. ISBN 2-7021-3293-6
• Roques-Briscard, Christian (1987). La passion d'Adjani, Lausanne et al.: Favre. ISBN 2-8289-0279-X
• Zurhorst, Meinolf (1992). Isabelle Adjani : ihre Filme, ihr Leben. Heyne Film- und Fernsehbibliothek, Band 163. München: Heyne. ISBN 9783453052383
• Rissa, Alvaro (pseudonimo di Walter Lapini) (2015), Ode an Isabelle, in Antologia della letteratura greca e Latina, Genova: Il Melangolo. ISBN 978-88-6983-004-4
• d'Estais, Jérôme Possession, Tentatives d'exorcisme, Editions Rouge profond, 2019 (ISBN 979-1097309138)

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• Isabelle Adjani at AllMovie