from Reuters / by Alex Dobuzinskis

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – French actress Marion Cotillard has gone from playing singing legend Edith Piaf to portraying the girlfriend of another kind of popular hero, bank robber John Dillinger.

In the movie “Public Enemies” opening on July 1, Cotillard plays Billie Frechette, a woman who fell in love with Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp, during his ill-fated cops-and-robbers war with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1930s.

Cotillard won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Piaf in 2007 movie “La Vie en Rose.” Her role in “Public Enemies” as the daughter of a Frenchman and an American Indian is her first since winning the Academy Award.

She spoke to Reuters in French from Chicago about her character Billie Frechette, her love of the Windy City and her upbringing in France in a family of actors.

Q: What did Billie Frechette see in John Dillinger that attracted her to him?

A: “At a young age, she was sent to a boarding school, and it was a very difficult place where they tried to erase everything that was Indian in her. And I think that she encountered there a great injustice, and she shared with Dillinger a suspicion of authority. I think the two of them saw that in each other and they fell in love immediately, and there was a very strong connection between them.”

Q: Growing up in a household of actors, did you often practice scenes with your parents?

A: “Yes, because my parents were actors and theater directors. And my father was a director for children’s theater after having been a mime for a long time. So, seeing actors rehearse was something very familiar to me.”

Q: Did that influence you as an actress?

A: “I was absolutely fascinated that you could make a living telling other people’s stories by imparting your emotion to them. And I always wanted to be an actress. My first work as an actress was when I was about five years-old.”

Q: You played in a scene that young?

A: “I made two small movies for television. And before that I remember acting in a play with my mother, and it was very disorienting because I played the daughter of another actress. They were telling me that she was my mom, but I knew she wasn’t. In fact, my real mom was also on stage. I remember being very disoriented by that.”

Q: How did you prepare for your English-speaking role in this movie?

A: “I worked with a speech coach for several months, and I had to relearn how to use my face and my body, because the way of saying certain letters is so different in French than in English, and it was very hard to train myself in that.”

Q: What did you do for fun while you were shooting this movie in Chicago?

A: “I went to a lot of museums because I love museums and there are a lot of marvelous ones here. Also, I went dancing at the Green Mill (cocktail lounge) and listened to jazz there. I was there often, I liked that place.

“I love this city. I love the architecture. I love the 1930s and there’s a lot of sublime ’30s architecture here. I find the lake so energizing, so vast, so beautiful. I am looking at the lake now through my hotel window, it looks like the ocean.”

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Patricia Reaney)

from MTV Movies Blog / by Eric Ditzian

Everything sounds better with a French accent. That’s just a fact, and it’s something Movies Editor Josh Horowitz learned anew while chatting with Marion Cotillard about her upcoming Christopher Nolan film, “Inception.”

No matter that the Parisian actress wouldn’t give up the juicy inside facts—partly because she didn’t know, partly because declined to say—about the secretive film that we crave here at MTV News. No matter that all she’d tell us about the plot is that it’s “about the mind.” No matter that she teased Josh at one point, “You so want to have information—I can see you!”

Cotillard simply sounds so sweetly agreeable when she’s speaking, it’s hard to complain. We did manage to learn that the majority of her scenes will be alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, who is set to play her husband. We did learn the movie itself is chockfull of action sequences. And she did go into detail about her first reaction upon reading the script for the film, which also co-stars Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Caine.

“[Nolan] is so interesting,” she said, while promoting “Public Enemies,” her Johnny Depp-starring gangster flick. “He writes his own scripts. He seems to be, from what I saw and what I read, so rich inside. He’s got so many things to say and share and he’s a very, very smart guy. You really can feel it in his writing.”

What else did we learn? That Cotillard could read me the phone book for the entire July 4th weekend and I wouldn’t protest. Check out the rest of the video to find out more about “Inception” and why Cotillard finds Nolan’s film très complexe.

from Associated Press / by Christina M. Wright

CHICAGO (AP) — Marion Cotillard says the most challenging part of playing John Dillinger’s love interest in the upcoming film “Public Enemies” was developing a believable Midwestern accent.

The Academy Award-winning actress worked for four months with a dialect coach, two hours a day, to tone down her natural French accent.

“It was really weird because she taught me how to use my jaw and my tongue in a different way,” she said during a recent interview.

Her biggest challenge?

The R and the L.

“I think it was the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do,” she said.

Eventually, Cotillard – who won a best-actress Oscar for playing chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose” – pulled it off to play her half-French, half-Indian character, Billie Frechette.

Michael Mann, the director of “Public Enemies,” said he had seen Cotillard’s previous movies and knew she could overcome speech problems.

“I knew mechanically, with fantastic discipline, a great work ethic and just hard work, she will master the English,” he said.

After “Public Enemies,” which stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, Cotillard played a character who had a French accent over a British accent.

Her biggest problem: the R’s and the L’s – again.

“I was like, `Are you kidding me?! It took me four months to get this R and L,’” she said.

Accent has been a constant challenge for the 33-year-old Cotillard, who acts in French and English movies. She learned English when she was 11. When she got her first English role (in Tim Burton’s “Big Fish”) she went to the Berlitz language center to work on her English accent.

Then, she returned to France for a role in her first language. On the first day, in the first scene, she spent three hours on the very first line.

Despite the constant stream of dialect coaches, Cotillard said she likes the challenge of changing her accent for roles. She said it makes her appreciate success more.

“I like when it’s really something that you don’t get right away,” she said. “You just have to work and work and work.”

I added 6 more ‘Public Enemies‘ stills. As you must have noticed, Marion Cotillard is very busy at the moment and I could almost constantly update the site with news etc. My own life however, is pretty busy too right now, so I don’t know how soon I will catch up with everything. Thank you for your patience!

Don’t forget, Marion will appear on Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson tonight at 12:35am ET/PT on CBS.

New release date for ‘Le dernier vol‘ in France is November 11, 2009.

Marion Cotillard’s character in ‘Inception‘ is reportedly called Lisa Hastley.

006 Public Enemies – 2009 > Stills

Following the special screening of ‘Public Enemies‘ in Chicago on Thursday, Marion Cotillard joined Johnny Depp and Christian Bale for a press conference in the Peninsula Hotel, also in Chicago, on Friday, June 19.

016 ‘Public Enemies’ Press Conference

Marion Cotillard graced the cover of Daily Telegraph Saturday insert Telegraph Magazine on June 20. Thanks to Lorna I’ve added the scans to the gallery. Please also take time to read the in-depth portrait/interview either on the scans or in our press archive, it’s really well worth your time!

• Dark Star, Telegraph Magazine, June 20

She’s a great and real person who doesn’t fall into the movie stardom cliché. She is an artist first and foremost, and I’ve never seen anyone work so hard in my life. When you went into the rehearsal room, there she would be, working and working. She was just living the role. Daniel Day-Lewis was absolutely blown away by her, as I was, as anybody was.
- Rob Marshall, director of Nine

Kindly do not redistribute these scans at another Marion Cotillard fan site as they were obtained/donated exclusively for ‘Magnifique Marion Cotillard’. Thank you.

005 Scans from 2009 > Telegraph Magazine (UK) – June 20

Finally, the pictures of Marion at Thursday’s ‘Public Enemies‘ premiere & after party in Chicago. Her ’50s-inspired Christian Dior dress with silver Sergio Rossi slingbacks and a red leather belt and bag were named Look of the Day by InStyle.com.

I also have some videos etc for you. But I’m currently battling a cold and should really stay in bed.

Cotillard spoke of Chicagoans’ enthusiasm for their city and mentioned that she lived near O’Brien’s during the shoot.

Depp and co-star Marion Cotillard briefly greeted the crowd, and seemed to have a pretty good rapport as they kibbitzed with each other before the screening.

The actors all raved about the city of Chicago and the people here. Cotillard said she was a fan of Gibson’s steakhouse.

040 ‘Public Enemies’ Premiere – Chicago

According to ScreenCave, Marion’s costars Leonardo DiCaprio and Ken Watanabe together with director Christopher Nolan have already started filming ‘Inception‘ earlier this month in Japan.

As the movie reportedly will be shot in 5 different countries until at least November we’re not sure when and where Marion Cotillard will join the team, but according to reports we had from Cannes it will be after she finishes filming ‘Les petits mouchoirs‘ in August.

from Telegraph Magazine (UK) / by Heather Hodson

Her performance as Edith Piaf brought the French actress Marion Cotillard worldwide recognition and an Oscar, and now she is to act opposite Johnny Depp in a violent Depression-era gangster film. She talks about why she feels she was born to portray complicated women.

When Marion Cotillard was nine years old and growing up in the French city of Orléans, she had what might be described as a full-blown existential crisis. ‘I didn’t know where was my place anywhere –in school, with friends, with the other children,’ she says in her faintly broken English. ‘I was shy. I was more than shy. I think I started thinking about why I was here, and I couldn’t find any answers, so it was very disturbing for me. I was not very happy because I wanted some answers. [It was] as if my brain had lost the innocence too quickly.’

The feeling that something was amiss persisted, even into her twenties. ‘I was totally melancholic,’ she says with gusto. ‘When I think about this period, which was really long, now that I have enough love for myself I can watch this period and be touched by this child, but I couldn’t bear being in that state of sadness.’ The odd thing about it, she says, is that she has always had a close and loving family. ‘Because my parents loved us, I couldn’t dream of a better family, better brothers, better mother and father. But there was something, I don’t know, something dark, really dark about me.’

Sitting in the penthouse suite of a fashionable hotel in downtown New York one recent afternoon, the 34-year-old star of La vie en rose – whose performance as Edith Piaf won her an Oscar in 2008 – doesn’t strike you as a woman who has ever been racked with anxiety, even for a nano-second. For a start, she is quite exquisitely beautiful, with milk-white skin and wide, blue-grey eyes. There is also the matter of her style. Dressed in a charcoal-grey Proenza Schouler jacket, striped grey T-shirt, grey moleskin jeans and flat-heeled boots, she exudes the kind of nonchalant glamour that the French, particularly French actresses, are so prone to.

How could this naturally gorgeous, graceful woman feel anything other than totally confident in herself? She gives a little shrug. ‘I didn’t like myself. I don’t know if someone who doesn’t like themselves, I don’t know if they have explanations, but that was what I was. I hated myself. I just had to live and find something, so that I would do something good and finally say, yeah, maybe I’m not that un-interesting person I think I am.’ What finally stopped this business of not feeling good enough was acting. At 15 Cotillard went to drama school, where ‘I found my place,’ she says, shooting me a smile. ‘And more than my place, I found the way I could express things.’ On graduating, she made a promise to herself. ‘I [decided] I would fight, that I would do everything that was possible, in a respectful way of course, to do what I wanted to do: to be an actress, just to be an actress.’

This reveals a number of things about Marion Cotillard: there is her propensity for complicated emotion (but then she is an actress, and French, after all); there is her sense that her intrinsic worth is indivisible from her acting; and there is her fierce commitment, the willingness to do whatever it takes.

‘She is an artist who has a tremendously healthy ambition to do really great work,’ Michael Mann, the director of her latest film, Public Enemies, says. Rob Marshall, who cast Cotillard alongside Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicole Kidman, Dame Judi Dench and Sophia Loren in his forthcoming film of the stage musical Nine (inspired by Fellini’s 8½), says she is an example of someone whose dedication to the craft of acting far outshines her status as a celebrity.

‘She’s a great and real person who doesn’t fall into the movie stardom cliché,’ he says. ‘She is an artist first and foremost, and I’ve never seen anyone work so hard in my life.’ As Luisa Contini, the wife of Daniel Day-Lewis’s film director Guido Contini, she sings and dances as well as portraying a great deal of emotional complexity. ‘When you went into the rehearsal room, there she would be, working and working,’ Marshall says. ‘She was just living the role. Daniel Day-Lewis was absolutely blown away by her, as I was, as anybody was.’

All her qualities are on full display in Public Enemies, which is released next month. Michael Mann’s film is a strange hybrid – an old-fashioned romance set at the centre of a violent gangster thriller that depicts the downfall of the legendary Chicago gangsters John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd during the Great Depression. Cotillard plays Billie Frechette, the girlfriend of Johnny Depp’s Dillinger, and the film reverberates with the chemistry between the pair. ‘With Marion, she’s totally authentic,’ Mann says. ‘You can give a great performance but you can’t give the heart of an actress without real authenticity. She’s committed and unselfconscious – she has complete artistic authenticity. You see that in different moments with other actors. Johnny has it. And with Marion, it’s every look.’

Evelyn ‘Billie’ Frechette was an emotionally scarred, financially vulnerable woman, the daughter of a French father and a Native American mother, who lived on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin until the age of 13 – a life of great deprivation in the 1920s. For four years she attended a boarding school for Native Americans, moving to Chicago when she was 18 and living a hand-to-mouth existence as a dance hall girl and a dice girl before meeting Dillinger.

In preparation for the role, Cotillard talked to Wilma Mankiller, the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995, as well as Michael Chapman, a member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, and spent time in Las Vegas and Chicago, talking to girls working in nightclubs and bars. Cotillard also trained herself to speak in a French-Canadian-Wisconsin accent without a trace of her native tongue.

‘It was the hardest thing, really, I’ve ever had to do. Even being old and depressed like Edith Piaf was much easier. The hardest thing was that I deeply knew that it wouldn’t be perfect and it’s – agh! It was something unbearable.’ For four months she worked with a dialect coach every day, and during the three-month shoot, in true method style, spoke only in English, even to her family and friends.

‘I couldn’t speak French. No French. Even my French friends and my family when they called me, we would speak English.’

Cotillard has acting in her genes. Her father is the stage actor Jean-Claude Cotillard, her mother, Niseema Theillaud, is also an actress. They were, their daughter says in her charming English, ‘the first in their family to take the artistic pact’, and Marion is her parents’ daughter. Even as a child, Cotillard knew that she would become an actress – ‘I’ve always known it’ – and cites her parents’ influence as a deciding factor. ‘They really developed our imagination in many ways.’ They raised Marion and her younger twin brothers, Quentin and Guillaume, in a loving, noisy, bohemian household, first in a suburb outside Paris, and then in Orléans – a time Cotillard describes as ‘magical’. She recalls how she and her brothers would be allowed to draw and paint on the walls of the family home and how her parents read them fairy tales and invented stories in which they participated.

‘I was fascinated by this world of telling stories, of having a different day every day. And my parents were – still are – passionate people, and to be raised with passionate people who open the door of your imagination and your creativity, I think it’s why I am an actress now.’

She made her first film appearance at the age of five, in a production by one of her parents’ friends, and a few years later there followed parts in two small television films, again made by a friend of the family. But she didn’t take up acting seriously until she was 15, when she entered the Conservatoire d’art dramatique in Orléans. On graduating, she dived into work, over the next half decade or so appearing in many French television and film productions, including Luc Besson’s blockbuster Taxi series, but despite her success – by now she had become a notable actress in France – the work did not satisfy her. ‘I was doing movies and I was not happy, I wanted more than what I had. I started to feel that I had some anger that it wouldn’t be fast enough, that I wouldn’t do [good roles], and I started getting jealous. It’s not very constructive for me to be jealous, so I told myself, OK, I’m going to take some time off.

I don’t want to wait for the phone, I don’t want to do things just to earn money, because a passion shouldn’t be like that.’ And then, as is so often the way with these things, at the critical moment the life-changing call came. ‘Tim Burton offered me the role in Big Fish, and this was exactly what I wanted.’ She pauses to clarify herself. ‘It was not “exactly”, it was much more than I had dreamt of. And then I told myself, you wanted to leave, and here comes something so fulfilling, so maybe you should think twice! Maybe it’s actually your right place to be an actress.’

Big Fish (2003), in which Cotillard plays the pregnant wife of Billy Crudup, marked Cotillard’s debut in an American production and established her in the international eye. There followed a series of shimmering performances, the most powerful of which were those in which she portrayed characters with some form of psychological disturbance: the wild, thrill-seeking girlfriend of Guillaume Canet in the 2003 film Love Me If You Dare, in which the lovers end up drowning in cement; the unhinged, murderous prostitute Tina Lombardi in A Very Long Engagement (2004), in which she acted the better-known Audrey Tautou off the screen and landed a César Award for the performance. But it was the world-conquering biopic La vie en rose, released in 2007, that gave us the full measure of her as an actress.

The French singer Edith Piaf, who was abandoned as a child by both parents, brought up in a brothel by her grandmother, and lived as a street urchin before finding fame, led a roller-coaster life of vertiginous highs and lows, marred in its final years by her morphine addiction, and the deaths of her only child and of her lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan. The writer and director Olivier Dahan spared none of the details, and as Piaf Cotillard delivered an extraordinary feat of metamorphosis, managing to appear a foot shorter than her 5ft 6in frame and, though she was 32 at the time, playing Piaf from the age of 17 to her death from cancer at 47 with total conviction. It was, according to the American film critic Stephen Holden, ‘the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another that I have ever encountered in film’, and Cotillard went on to win a Bafta, a Golden Globe and a César, and became only the second French actress to win an Oscar – and the first to win it for a performance in the French language.

Playing Edith Piaf, Cotillard tells me, changed more than just her career prospects. ‘I’ve never gone so deeply in someone’s emotions, so it affected, but in a good way, my emotions. I went deep somewhere that it has awakened things that I had hidden because it was too hard to face. And after the movie I started to face those things I was afraid of. I had to get rid of a lot of my fears.’ What sort of fears? ‘I am not very good at expressing myself in a simple way so it can create mis-understandings and I hate that. And I fight and… there are a lot of situations where if I could have handled it at the time it would have gone, and I didn’t because I’m afraid of confrontation, I’m always afraid to express myself in the wrong way and to be misunderstood and to give something of an image of myself that I’m not. So most of the time I don’t say anything because of being fearful of being wrong. And with Piaf, suddenly I wanted to face my fear, because I know that when you face your fears it disappears for real.’

Marion Cotillard may be a woman assailed by vulnerability and anxieties, but in her acting life she is nothing but formidable. ‘She likes to dive into something that’s not comfortable. I really feel that she’s fearless in that way,’ Rob Marshall says. ‘She can become so many things.’ Michael Mann agrees: ‘She can do everything. She can do absolutely anything.’ As the new face of Dior, she recently shot The Lady Noire with Olivier Dahan, a short film in which she plays a Hitchcock-style femme fatale.

She has a number of films in the pipeline, including Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi action thriller Inception, in which she stars opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, and Karim Dridi’s Le dernier vol de Lancaster (The Last Flight of Lancaster), based on a novel of the same name. In the French film she stars alongside her boyfriend, the French actor and director Guillaume Canet – he won a César for his film Tell No One – with whom she lives in Paris and whom she met when they starred together in Love Me If You Dare. On the subject of Canet, who was formerly married to the German model-actress Diane Kruger, she is uncharacteristically buttoned-up.

When I ask if she is still in a relationship with a well-known French actor she looks coy and then laughs. ‘Yeah, I am. I’m not a liar. I couldn’t say no, because if he reads that he will call and say, “Eh, what’s going on?”’ But later, when discussing her film projects, she can’t help giving herself away when she proudly mentions a forthcoming role in ‘a French movie, with the director of Tell No One, Guillaume Canet’. She slides me a look, and then lets out a raucous belly laugh. ‘Voilà!’

Towards the end of our interview Cotillard says that she would like to take some time off and settle down, ideally in the French countryside. ‘You can’t work all your life,’ she says, then adds apologetically, ‘I was thinking, of course, about my life, which is a lucky, lucky, lucky life. I have the choice to take a big break and I have to do that. I want to have babies so I must take some time to have babies.’ In this she was given good counsel by Daniel Day-Lewis. ‘He gave me one advice. Take care of my life. Don’t work too much. He’s right.

And that’s why you have to come back to your life, because it is in your life where you can find the desire to tell someone a story, and if you don’t live your life then you are not interesting any more, because what will you tell? If I’m always in different stories which are not mine I’ll be lost and I’ll be poor. Poor of my own life. And I don’t want that.’ She continues, warming to her theme: ‘There are so many things that I want to do, that I don’t do, that I could do, but sometimes I’m too tired to after a working day… I need to have some time to do all the things I really care for. So at some point I will have to sit, be pregnant, and do a lot of things! That’s the plan.’

‘Public Enemies’ is released on July 3

from ChicagoNow, Metromix the Blog / by Matt Pais

Johnny Depp. Christian Bale. Marion Cotillard. Director (and Chicago native) Michael Mann. It didn’t cause quite the mayhem of 2007′s local “Ocean’s Thirteen” premiere (featuring appearances by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac and Ellen Barkin), but it was certainly a scene.

Tons of fans gathered, shrieked, took photos and waited around for autographs, with plenty getting their wish as Depp came back to sign autographs after all the other stars had gone inside the AMC River East theatre and all the press had gone home. Unfortunately neither Depp, who plays legendary bank robber John Dillinger in the film (out July 1), nor Bale, who plays FBI Agent Melvin Purvis, offered barely any interviews to print/web outlets. (Bale smiled but didn’t answer when I asked what kind of cop he’d make in real life. Perhaps that’s not the right question to ask someone who’s been arrested before? Anyway, click here for my 2007 interview with Bale, about “3:10 to Yuma.”)

I did, however, get some face time with Cotillard (Oscar winner for “La Vie En Rose”), who plays Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette, and Mann, who directed and co-wrote the film. (Plus, just because he was walking by, I snagged a quote from Evanston native and former “CSI” star William Petersen.)

What’s the coolest thing you discovered in Chicago when filming here?

Marion Cotillard: People. They were so nice. I met a lot of people and they have a lot of character. This is a city of culture. That’s what I like about Chicago. And they’re very friendly and they want to share … they’re really in love with their city here. And it’s beautiful because I didn’t know anything about the city and all the people I met really wanted me to discover their city with them.

Why do women find bank robbers sexy?

MC: Um, there are bank robbers that are not sexy actually. I think it’s about Dillinger. [Laughs] He had that class. He didn’t know any better than robbing banks. He spent half of his life in jail and I think it was a big injustice that he spent so much time in jail. He was so charismatic and also it was a very tough time for America. It was the depression and all the people … they didn’t have any money, they didn’t know how to survive without any money. And suddenly that guy goes and takes the money where it is. He was not a murderer. He was just someone who tried to survive. I think that’s why he was so fascinating.

What was it like to flesh out your character and not have her minimized like some other takes on the Dillinger story?

MC: Actually I have never seen a movie about Dillinger or the role of Billie Frechette. I think that what it great with Michael Mann’s movies is that the women always have a strong and important part in the movie. It’s not just a beautiful thing in the corner because you have to have a beautiful thing in the corner. It’s more than that. When you see all his movies you really feel the strength of the women.

Is it different filming a period movie in Chicago, compared to L.A. or Miami?

Michael Mann: No, it’s the same. You have to go out and research to find a match of what exactly it feels like. What it felt like then. What the streets looked like. What was the lighting. The streetlights were different, you know. What was on the streets?

Did you have a leg up coming from here?

MM: Absolutely. I had a sense of what things looked like. My parents were alive in that period.

Who’s a bigger crook: Dillinger or Blagojevich?

MM: Dillinger. Put it this way: Dillinger was an honest outlaw. He really went in there and he took the money. That’s a lot different than pretending you’re something else.

What’s the secret for taking down Chicago crooks?

William Petersen: Shoot ‘em. That way you don’t have to try ‘em.