You are viewing the archive for July, 2007. Show all posts

Just saw Variety’s Women’s Impact Report 2007 and their feature about Marion Cotillard. Click the link to read the full article, I’m only going to quote a few bits. Other women in the report include Helen Mirren, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Tina Fey, Rosie O’Donnell, Paula Wagner, J.K. Rowling, Bjork and many more.

She’s one of the year’s first real Oscar contenders, which is no small feat considering how few Americans will recognize Marion Cotillard when they see “La Vie en rose.”

To watch Cotillard in action is to suspect that no human has ever lived as much — or suffered as deeply — as the wounded sparrow she plays onscreen.

To an outsider, re-creating such intense pain may seem like masochism, but “it’s what I like to do,” Cotillard insists. “When I play tragedy, I have fun. It’s a very vast place to express yourself.”

What’s next: Nothing official yet, but thanks to the international success of “La Vie en rose,” “I have very interesting offers now,” she says.

July 31, 2007

0 Comments

Posted by Mia • Filed In General

from Variety / by Peter Debruge

‘La Vie en rose’ thesp an Oscar contender

She’s one of the year’s first real Oscar contenders, which is no small feat considering how few Americans will recognize Marion Cotillard when they see “La Vie en rose.” Even in her native France, where Cotillard co-starred in the first three installments of Luc Besson’s hugely successful “Taxi” franchise, the actress was not yet a big enough name to satisfy “Rose’s” co-producers.
But director Olivier Dahan wrote his Edith Piaf biopic with the young starlet specifically in mind. When the financiers balked, Dahan scaled back the budget and moved forward with Cotillard. But that meant an even greater challenge for the actress, since she would not have the luxury of playing the French chanteuse’s life in chronological order.

“When I saw that the fourth day of shooting for me was a scene in 1960 when she hears the song ‘No Regrets,’ I was really scared,” Cotillard says. But getting the climax out of the way early proved an unexpected blessing. “If we had saved the aging for the end of the movie, I would have been paralyzed with fear.”

Within the first two weeks, Cotillard had visited the full range of Piaf’s life, from age 17 to 47, and had found the pleasure in all those periods.

Though Piaf’s singing voice was her signature, it is Cotillard’s expressive eyes that sell her performance, the vital link in a full-body transformation that gains resilience even as her character grows brittle in the face of cancer, addiction and tragedy. To watch Cotillard in action is to suspect that no human has ever lived as much — or suffered as deeply — as the wounded sparrow she plays onscreen.

To an outsider, re-creating such intense pain may seem like masochism, but “it’s what I like to do,” Cotillard insists. “When I play tragedy, I have fun. It’s a very vast place to express yourself.”

Vocation: actress

Recent breakthrough: After a series of supporting turns, Cotillard carries “La Vie en rose” on her shoulders.

Role models: “There are many people that I admire: Meryl Streep, Sir Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, Brad Pitt, Michael Keaton.”

Career mantra: “I think art has no frontier…Also, how to translate this into English in order not to spoil the idea? I think that you attract what you need.”

What’s next: Nothing official yet, but thanks to the international success of “La Vie en rose,” “I have very interesting offers now,” she says.

July 30, 2007

0 Comments

Posted by Mia • Filed In English Press

from The Age (Australia) / Stephanie Bunbury

In an extraordinary turn as France’s ”little sparrow”, Marion Cotillard’s Edith Piaf is almost better than the original, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

All the time she was shooting La Vie en Rose, says Marion Cotillard, she barely slept at night. Edith Piaf, the peerless French chanteuse whose life was being brought to the screen, had always slept badly. Now she did the same. “One hour, two – three was huge!” she recalls in her careful, glamorously accented English. “And, after two weeks, I started to be afraid because that never happens to me before. I can sleep 10 hours without waking up. Really!”

So: no sleep. That was the deal. Cotillard, at 31 one of life’s instinctual hard workers, was not about to betray the role by succumbing to the lure of sleeping pills.

“So I just decided to be focused on everything I was doing, especially when I was cutting things to prepare the dinner or climbing the stairs. My nerves were telling me I was not tired, but you have to be tired when you don’t sleep. So all I could do was be careful. It was my reality.”

It continued to be her reality, she says, for four and a half months.

Cotillard’s performance as Piaf has been lauded as the best on screen this year – one of the best, perhaps, in any year – even by critics who didn’t like the film itself. Olivier Dahan, the director, clearly wanted to avoid the leaden plod of the average biopic. Instead, he jumps about Piaf’s life like the little sparrow that was her namesake, alighting alternately on her appallingly deprived childhood, her early youth singing and drinking on the streets of Paris, her feted career, her mid-life degeneration and her premature old age. Nothing, complain the naysayers, gets a chance to develop. Piaf’s daughter, for example, flashes past as a deathbed recollection; she is born and dies within just a few moments.

Cotillard, however, manages to give even the tiniest moment in La Vie en Rose a sense of depth. Piaf was, she says, a very powerful personality; she, in turn, is such a powerful presence on screen that she temporarily eclipses the original.

“The first and only thing Olivier told me,” she says, “was that he wanted to see me in there. Because we all knew I couldn’t disappear.”

Not long after seeing La Vie En Rose, I went into a Parisian music shop with, inevitably, shelves full of Piaf recordings. The cover pictures seemed to show an impostor: someone who looked very like Piaf, but not quite.

Of course, this resemblance was meticulously constructed. Cotillard is beautiful, fresh, radiant: in short, nothing like Piaf. They shaved her hair back to create Piaf’s high forehead. Her eyebrows also were shaved off and redrawn as fake lines, a la Piaf. Make-up for the older Piaf – she died at 47, but was so ravaged by successive addictions that she looked at least 30 years older – took between three and six hours.

Cotillard actually enjoyed those sessions, she says, because her perpetual exhaustion meant she always slept while the make-up artists pleated in the wrinkles. Although, she adds, the fumes from the latex and glue on her face did give her some extraordinary nightmares.

The film’s great trick, however, was to make Cotillard look about a foot shorter. Piaf was tiny – only four foot eight – while Cotillard is tall and gangling; as we talk, she periodically rearranges her long limbs along the couch. So she worked in bare feet while everyone else wore stacked shoes; and they built oversized tables and chairs designed to dwarf her. Her short-waisted dresses gave her the proportions of a much smaller woman.

“And I contracted my body somehow,” she shrugs, “to make small.”

When it came to evoking Piaf as a person, however, she didn’t want to use any tricks at all. When Dahan approached her, all Cotillard knew about the life and times of Piaf were a couple of signature tunes, the fact that she wore black on stage “and had a body language very specific”. She proceeded to watch all the available footage, both of performances and interviews, and to read biographies. But she didn’t do anything towards mastering that specific body language. She didn’t practise Piaf’s speaking voice. As for the songs, she didn’t even consider singing them. The last thing she wanted to do, she says, was try to imitate the real Piaf.

“Because there is no life in imitation,” she says. “You become a mimic and the emotions are gone; to imitate someone, I don’t think you have to understand the inside of the person and I really wanted to do that. Because it is a role also. You have to consider it as a role because it is.”

So she just read, watched, absorbed and had faith that when she started filming – Dahan did not want even to rehearse – a character called Edith Piaf would emerge from within.

“I felt that the combination of all the images in the footage I watched for three months and my journey inside, I would say, would create something on the set. And some really little things during my preparation revealed to me that this was possible.”

One day, for example, a friend came to have lunch with her while she was working with her acting coach. “I was eating and he said, ‘Do you see how you behave?’ And I realised this was not my behaviour. I was not eating my way.”

Later on, momentarily afraid that her approach would not work, she simply read one of Piaf’s songs to herself. “Just to hear if something was happening. And it was.” What was? “I didn’t hear my voice in my head; I started hearing something that was close to what I wanted to do.”

Anyway, she laughs, if you did try to imitate Piaf, she would surely come after you. “She would say, ‘What are you doing?’.”

As the film shows, Piaf was not an easy character: demanding, duplicitous and often drunk, racked by the pain of arthritis and then by addiction to the morphine that relieved it, she was a brilliant tyrant. Cotillard lived with that presence around the clock.

“During the shooting I was never alone. Really! But you just have to be aware that someone is with you. I knew that when I was home, I was not totally me. I knew my humour was not mine. I knew the way I was walking was not mine. But because I knew it, it was not dangerous.”

And if Piaf could behave abominably, Cotillard felt she understood why. Her mother left her with her own mother, a decrepit old woman living in filth, while she walked the streets. Her father, returning from the front after World War I, snatched her away only to dump her with an aunt who ran a brothel while he rejoined his circus.

“When you are abandoned by two parents as a baby – wow, that is something to live with. I think the origin of that tyrannical side of her was her huge fear of being alone. She was so afraid of that. I know because people who knew her told me. And because she was very smart, because she had that power she had, sometimes she used it to keep people around her.”

Cotillard also began performing when was very young; her parents are both actors and she first appeared on stage as a child in one of her father’s plays. She never seriously considered any other career.

Her first big break came when she was cast in Luc Besson’s Taxi series. A star in France, she has worked three times in English – in Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Abel Ferrara’s Mary and opposite Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year (2006).

“He was absolutely not difficult!” she assures me. “He was the nicest guy. Really! Sometimes he was like a big kid, trying to make everybody happy.”

What she has in common with Piaf, however, is her passion for work.

“The passion of sharing emotions and telling stories about two people. More than a passion, a necessity. But, if I’m not able to go on stage because I have a car accident, I won’t be taking morphine.”

That, she feels, was a symptom of Piaf’s fear of failure. Not as a performer: she was quite prepared to go on stage and collapse after one or two songs.

“But she did the show. That was important for her. She was so afraid of something she had to hide by being on stage. That is my point of view about her. But my failure, I want to face it, even if I am afraid.”

There is not much that could frighten her, at least professionally, after La Vie En Rose.

“I discovered many things about my capacities by doing this role,” she says. “When I started work on the project, I thought no one person could do all this. But I knew one thing about myself: that I can work hard. I was afraid but I knew that, with work, I could do something. And I discovered a way to abandon myself that I didn’t know. I discovered that work is not enough. You have to find the place where you abandon everything of yourself. Then you can let something else happen.”

July 15, 2007

0 Comments

Posted by Mia • Filed In English Press

from Adelaide Now (Australia) / by Kirsten Heysen

WHAT became a labour of love could earn an Oscar for the rising French star Marion Cotillard, who plays Edith Piaf in a new movie.

La Vie En Rose, directed by Olivier Dahan, follows legendary French singer Edith Piaf’s turbulent life from her childhood (she was born in 1915) to her death in 1963.

Cotillard is unquestionably brilliant in the role.

“Piaf worked all the days of her life, all the time,” Cotillard says.

“I know with work you can do many things. I love to work and I knew that I could do something with this role.”

The 31-year-old Paris-born actor was last seen opposite Russell Crowe in the Ridley Scott flop A Good Year in which she played a stunning waitress working in cafe in the south of France. Cotillard’s physical transformation for La Vie En Rose is astonishing.

Edith Piaf was born Edith Giovanna Gassion and given her stage name, meaning “sparrow”, by her first manager.

Cotillard is more than a foot taller than the tiny singer, but clever camera work and her attention to detail (she stoops, walks and gestures exactly like Piaf) make the role convincing.

Cotillard’s eyebrows were plucked out and painted back on and her hairline shaved to make it higher. Make-up and prosthetics were used to age the actor, who portrays three decades of Piaf’s life. “We found this crazy guy who believed it could work,” Cotillard says. “I called him Picasso.

“Before him, several make-up artists gave up, but I think in the end it worked. I can’t believe this, but I slept during the make-up sessions.

“I’m really sleeping and they are drawing on my skin and painting, you know all the veins and the red areas you have when you get older.

“It was a very artistic job.”

Yet the most difficult aspect of the role was lip-synching to classics like Piaf’s anthem Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No, I Regret Nothing).

Dahan was adamant that Piaf’s actual singing voice be used in the film, meaning Cotillard had to mime behind recorded performances.

“The lip-synching was the hardest thing,” she says.

“It was very technical and took me ages to get something which I wanted to be perfect. You just have to do it again and again and again.

“You have to learn how to breathe in another person’s body.”

Dahan, after seeing Cotillard in films such as the French World War I epic A Very Long Engagement, was sure she was the only one for the role.

It was, he says, her sad eyes, that convinced him.

“He didn’t have any doubt and I think that was contagious, and when I read the script I felt something huge,” she says.

“I was so surprised in a way of that offer of someone coming to me and saying, ‘you are going to tell her whole life, you’re going to live, you’re going to sing, you’re going to love, you’re going to die’.

“I was more than happy. It was better than my dreams.”

Piaf’s life was tragic. A sickly child rejected by her alcoholic mother, she spent her childhood on the road or the streets with her circus acrobat father or at a brothel owned by her grandmother.

She was discovered singing on the streets and in her adult life became a big star, both in Europe and America.

Those years of success were also plagued by alcohol and drug addiction and the death of her lover, French boxer Marcel Cerdan.

“I had no understanding at all of her life before I started preparation for the movie, so my aim was to discover everything, to understand her soul and her heart,” Cotillard says.

“At the end my vision of her changed entirely. The image I had of her before was that little woman with that black dress doing many motions with her hands and of course the power of her voice.

“But I really didn’t know anything more about her.”

The story is not told chronologically, but rather as a series of vignettes.

Moments from childhood are interspersed with scenes of Piaf’s adult life; her career triumphs and personal tragedies.

“It’s like an emotional way of remembering everything just before dying,” Cotillard says. “When you remember life you won’t think of birth and so on in the right order to the end.

“You think of one thing and that reminds you of something else.

“That’s how Olivier wanted to write and edit the movie.”

While there has been criticism of Dahan’s decision to leave out Piaf’s involvement with the resistance during World War II, Cotillard would have liked Piaf’s last romance to have been included.

“I really felt that her last lover, Theo Sarapo, was very in love with her and it was a beautiful relationship, so when I read the script I was a little bit sad about that,” she says.

“During the war, yes, she did amazing things, but you have to make choices.

“Olivier really wanted to have scenes where you can learn something about her and her generosity.

“You can see this on stage.

“She gave everything. When you know this about her, you don’t need other proof.”

Cotillard’s performance has already generated an Oscar buzz. The star – who is from an acting family (“we talk about our passion for it, never about technique”) – acknowledges the intense role gave her the kind of opportunity actors spend their lives wishing for.

“I felt a kind of sadness when it was all over,” she says.

“I shared my life with someone for months and with someone so strong.

“I really fell in love with her.”

July 15, 2007

0 Comments

Posted by Mia • Filed In English Press

from Sunday Herald Sun (Australia) / by Lawrie Masterson

EDITH Piaf’s descent into drugs, booze, chronic arthritis and cancer was savage and swift. She died at 47, although in her final years she “looked 70 and acted like a child”, according to Marion Cotillard, the French actor who plays her with such distinction in La Vie En Rose.

“What surprised me most about her was the consecutive happiness – huge happiness – and then tragedy,” Cotillard said. “Her life was like this wave of amazing things and then deep, deep drama.

“Towards the end, the doctors told the people around her they couldn’t explain how she was still alive. I think it was passion and love that kept her going. She was full of those things.

“When I started on the project I didn’t know anything about her except a few songs and the (Piaf trademark) little black dress. But then I discovered the tyrannical behaviour and I didn’t want to look at it because it was a dark side that I didn’t accept.

“Then one day I read the script again and there is a line where she is asked whether she is afraid of death and she says she is more afraid of being alone – and I understood.

“I don’t excuse her behaviour because I don’t have the right to excuse or not. My aim was to understand her.”

The glamorous Cotillard came to understand the self-destructive Piaf so well, New York Times critic Stephen Holden recently called her performance “the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another I’ve ever encountered on film”.

Olivier Dahan’s film about “the Little Sparrow” is a breakthrough for Cotillard, until now best known outside France as the woman to whom Russell Crowe’s character lost his heart in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year.

That movie failed to click with audiences, but La Vie En Rose looks set to help 31-year-old Cotillard’s career explode, with her name already mentioned for consideration for major awards.

“I knew I would have to work a lot,” Cotillard says of the role that transformed her from cool beauty to the tiny dynamo stricken by tragedy and illness almost all her life.

“But I love to work, so it was perfect. I couldn’t push myself over the limit like she did, but I love my job and I have strength.”

Revered as one of the greatest singers France has produced, Edith Piaf was born Edith Giovanna Gassion.

She spent part of her formative years being raised by occupants of a Paris brothel and on the road with her father, who eked out a living as a street performer. At various times she is said to have been blind and deaf. At 16 she gave birth to a son, who died in infancy.

Piaf was “discovered” by nightclub owner Louis Leplee and made her first record in 1935. Her legacy includes standards such as La Vie En Rose, Hymne a L’amour, Milord and Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.

From poverty, she rose to mix with Jean Cocteau, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich – and to classify her behaviour as “difficult” would be one of the great understatements.

She is credited with fostering talents such as Yves Montand (she was his lover) and Charles Aznavour and, post-World War II, she became internationally acclaimed and appeared in concert at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall.

She married twice, but the man regarded as the great love of her life, champion boxer Marcel Cerdan, was killed in a plane crash in 1949. Her second husband, Theo Sarapo, is still alive and agreed to co-operate with the production of the film.

“He was a marvellous guy and I heard from some of Piaf’s friends that he really loved her,” Cotillard said.

A talented singer who believes she could hold down a lead role in a musical, Cotillard’s tastes lean towards Radiohead and Amy Winehouse.

She says she needed the best part of a year, not just three months, to train her voice to sound anything like Piaf. In the end she lip-synched, but it was hardly a cop-out. Even altering her hairline and having to spend up to five hours a day in make-up paled into insignificance.

• La Vie En Rose opens on Thursday.

July 8, 2007

0 Comments

Posted by Mia • Filed In English Press

from The Courier-Mail (Australia) / by Ryan Gilbey

FANS of French actress Marion Cotillard dropped their croissants in shock when it was announced she had been cast as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.

Not that she hadn’t proved herself, in a handful of roles, to be one of cinema’s most playful and thrilling new talents.

Critics who spoke of her promise risked sounding almost churlish in the face of the accomplishment displayed by Cotillard in outings such as A Very Long Engagement, Innocence and Love Me If You Dare.

Those performances, along with her American debut in Tim Burton’s Big Fish, had left audiences eager to see what she would pull off next.

But playing Piaf in Oliver Dahan’s biopic?

The picture was nominated for the Golden Bear in Berlin this year, where it opened the film festival and played in competition, but the real test was France. Happily, the country has embraced the film and its star.

French newspaper Le Monde declared that Cotillard surpasses what is generally expected of an actress; in its opening week, La Vie en Rose notched up more than 1,500,000 admissions – almost a third more than the internationally popular French romantic-comedy Amélie managed in its first seven days in 2001.

It seemed entirely possible that, in taking on the Kid Sparrow and all the cultural baggage that comes with her, this spring chicken might be pecking off more than she could chew. Surprisingly, one of the loudest squeals of disbelief to greet the news of Cotillard’s appointment came from Cotillard herself.

“The idea of me as Piaf was completely crazy,” the 31-year-old says in an incredulous, high-pitched voice that makes the decanters sing in her London hotel suite.

“But it seemed obvious to Oliver. I thought, OK, he’s crazy. Then I read the script, and I wanted to be as crazy as him.”

Crazy is a word Cotillard reaches for in practically every sentence. It might also be invoked to describe her personality in the nicest way.

When next year’s awards season rolls around, and she nabs the best-actress prize that should by rights be hers for La Vie en Rose, her reaction on Oscar night could well make Italian director Roberto Benigni’s notorious seat-vaulting incident at the ceremony in 1998 look subdued.

Yet for all that animation there is a certain frailty in her posture, and something imploring in her big eyes. Perhaps that’s why her casting as Piaf was met by some with bewilderment.

The two women share a physical slightness, but Piaf’s voice and presence, not to mention the reputation she accrued, made her seem colossal. Could Cotillard perform the same miraculous reversal?

In a word – yes. She is positively volcanic in the film, and she’s scarcely any different in person. Cotillard wastes no time in casting off her deceptively shy exterior. Over the course of this one-hour interview, she guffaws, cheers, hoots, punches the air, jumps to her feet and dances, and acts out the stories she is telling right there on the rug.

Her father once worked as a mime, which may explain that last part.

In the film, she plays Piaf from the age of 19 through to her death. And, though the singer died aged 47, she looked at least 80, with her haggard, sunken face and that fiercely receded hairline.

Indeed, if La Vie en Rose is primarily the triumph of Cotillard – whose stiff, jutting posture and spread-legged scuttle evoke the mix of strength and fragility in Piaf – praise should be reserved, too, for the astonishing endeavours of the make-up department that gave this slightly sultry beauty the look of a haunted rag doll.

So crucial was that make-up to Dahan’s conception that the entire production hung in the balance when it seemed the necessary effects would be impossible to achieve.

The director had conceived the movie as an intimate portrait of a legend, rather than a lofty or reverential paean in the Hollywood tradition. Hence his demand for tight close-ups, which meant, in turn, that Cotillard’s make-up would have to be flawless, lest any shortcomings be exposed.

Watching the film, you can appreciate the value of Dahan’s in-your-face approach.

On the first day of shooting, however, Cotillard feared the camera might never start rolling. “We weren’t prepared,” she says, wincing at the memory. “The make-up artist and the director of photography were arguing with Olivier, telling him it’s not possible. She’s only 30 – you can’t come that close and still make her look old. And Olivier was saying he wanted close-ups. He pushed them to find a way.”

So what was Cotillard doing while her collaborators were wrangling with one another?

“I was crying!” she laughs, squeezing out a long, keening wail to illustrate the extent of her desperation. “I was telling them, please, make me old! It drove me crazy. And when they finally found a way . . .” She raises her arms in celebration. “Woooo-hoooo!”

That expression of relief hardly conveys the rigmarole that Cotillard went through to become the scrawny, older Piaf.

The veteran make-up artist Didier Lavergne, known for his work with Roman Polanski, transformed her face into a chalky mask with hollowed eyes. Her hairline was shaved back; a wig resembling orange tumbleweed completed the ghastly ensemble.

Piaf hadn’t played a big part in Cotillard’s life before Dahan came calling.

“I only knew three or four of her songs,” she recalls. “For me, she was an amazing voice with a little black dress. I knew nothing of her tragic life.”

When Cotillard heard on the grapevine that Dahan was writing a script about Piaf, and that he was considering her for the part, she was level-headed enough to take no notice.

It seems impossible now that her performance won’t come to be seen as both the turning point in her career and a textbook example of how the greatest performers can disappear into a part.

Multiplex audiences will recognise Cotillard from the larky Taxi trilogy, or from playing Russell Crowe’s love interest in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year, but, while she’s perfectly agreeable in such confections, it is in La Vie en Rose that you experience her undiluted energy.

When you leave the cinema, however, it’s the inevitable show-stopper – Cotillard, as Piaf, delivering a goosebump-inducing Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien at the Olympia, in Paris – that will linger in the memory, and not only because it is deferred almost until the end, in a classic case of saving the best for last.

Sure, the actress is lip-synching, but the gusto with which she hurls herself into the rendition makes such details irrelevant.

“When we shot that scene, it was a very special day,” she says, before correcting herself. “No. Not a special day. It was the special day. We were actually in Olympia.

“Piaf’s soul lives somewhere in that place, I can tell you. And her best friend was in the audience, watching me and looking overwhelmed. I went on stage, and something happened.

“I didn’t do anything. It was like I wasn’t even there. I had lived with the character for several months. Piaf and I were like an old married couple: we communicated without speaking.”

From the outset, Cotillard had based her performance on such intuition, rather than analysis or rehearsal.

“I was afraid to rehearse. I didn’t want to become stale or mechanical. But the whole time, I was working on everything internally, saving it for the set. When I felt pleasure inside, I knew I was on the good track.”

When it comes to accepting parts she likes, she makes it sound like falling in love.

Take Tina Lombardi, the stylish, heartbroken femme fatale she played in A Very Long Engagement.

She had all of eight minutes’ screen time, yet she made the very most of it.

“I knew Tina was special when I read the script,” she purrs. “She fights for love, which is a beautiful thing to do. So, when the movie came out and lots of people loved her, I could understand that, because I loved her immediately too.”

The performance won Cotillard a César for best supporting actress. “I was happy for that,” she shrugs.

Clearly, we have stumbled on one subject this candid woman is reluctant to discuss – her success. Playing Tina was really the dream, and the César was a little cherry on top.

The mention of awards gives her the perfect excuse to change the subject and talk about her father, the actor-director-teacher Jean-Claude Cotillard.

“While I was on set playing Piaf, he won an award for directing a play. I was screaming and telling everyone about it.”

She springs into action and does a lap of honour around the sofa.

“I was like, ‘Woooooo! My father won an award!’ All day. By the end, the whole crew wanted to kill me.”

It turns out that every member of Cotillard’s immediate family is artistic in some way. One of her younger twin brothers is a writer, the other a sculptor.

Both her parents have acted, and she treasures memories of growing up in a bustling, creative household in the countryside near Orléans.

“When I was little, there were so many people in my house,” she reflects. “Everyone was enjoying themselves, rehearsing, having fun. It was like a playground.”

I ask if she realised then that not all children lived that way. “Yes, because my friends wanted to be at our house, where the fun was!”

Even the times when her parents went travelling with their acting troupe were a source of joy and excitement for her.

“It was amazing to get letters from them when they were in Hong Kong or Peru or wherever. And when they came home, they would bring me ponchos and all sorts of gifts. It was magical.”

It’s not hard to see the connection between the young Cotillard, pop-eyed over tales of her parents’ exotic adventures, and the adult version, who says she likes to find roles that are as different as possible from one another, and to search for pleasure and, of course, craziness.

“My parents definitely sparked something in me,” she says. “I’m sure of it. I saw how happy and fulfilled they were, and I knew I wanted the same job.

“Playing Piaf took seven months, in total, day and night. It took over my life. I even dreamt about Piaf – we had some night meetings. Seven months of my life for the greatest pleasure I ever had doing my job.”

She gives a naughty, ecstatic laugh, as though she can’t believe her luck.

“And if I had to do it again – oh, I would!”

La Vie en Rose opens in cinemas on Thursday.

July 7, 2007

0 Comments

Posted by Mia • Filed In English Press

Although I try to refrain from uploading too many new pictures – updating 2 galleries (one is the new one) is not only tiresome but also kind of pointless – I couldn’t resist adding these new scans from a major US publication: Interview, July issue:

     

July 2, 2007

0 Comments

Posted by Mia • Filed In Gallery Updates