from Los Angeles Times / by Mark Swed

Oscar-nominated Marion Cotillard uses her eyes the way the French chanteuse used her voice in ‘La Vie en Rose.’

MARION COTILLARD has been praised for channeling the legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf all but supernaturally in “La Vie en Rose.” She does nothing of the sort. Much more interesting than that, this Oscar nominee for best actress is a conduit to Piaf.

Sure, makeup makes a modern actress look uncannily like a great French chanteuse from an earlier generation. Cotillard expertly mimics Piaf’s gestures, at least the ones we know from what was caught on camera in the singer’s movie appearances, filmed concerts and interviews. Maybe Piaf was as childish as Cotillard portrays her, although I doubt it. The singer probably could be as hysterical.

But none of this explains Cotillard’s incandescent performance or her fabulous musicality. Any halfway decent actress should know how to sensationalize the tawdry biographical details as they are presented in this flawed but still mesmerizing film. Others could undoubtedly lip-sync as convincingly as Cotillard does. That, though, is small ambition.

In a brief featurette on the film’s DVD release, director Olivier Dahan says he recognized Piaf’s eyes in the actress. Cotillard’s eyes are, in fact, Cotillard’s eyes. Her great acting is with them, if not necessarily through them. Dahan trains his camera on her irises and doesn’t let go. But however ravishing, they are pathways to nowhere, certainly not to Piaf’s soul. Instead they see the world around them, which then seems, through them, perfectly marvelous.

Cotillard’s onlooker’s eyes, when she portrays Piaf’s performances on stage, reflect the theater — the audience, the ushers, the worn velvet of the seats. Cotillard doesn’t need to sing with her eyes; looking with them is enough.

And listening. This is where the awe comes in. Through her own deep gaze, Cotillard uses her eyes the way Piaf used her voice.

That voice was basically a documentary instrument. Piaf did not try to sound beautiful. She went to great effort, instead, to sound real. She knew what a money note was, and she knew how to blow her wad when she wanted to. But she was most amazing deadpan, letting her voice wryly reveal the life around her.

Piaf’s best songs are her songs about Paris, not about herself. They work best not as narratives but as aural descriptions. Her exaggerated rolled Rs, for instance, became the percussion of clinked glasses in the café. She presented the exhilaration of raw experience.

Piaf could be pathetic. She was proud and sad, and proud to be sad (which is a great way to sing but not such a hot way to live your life). In her relationships, Piaf fell in love easily and never well. But she loved her audience fervently. You never sense that she is singing to you personally — her personal life was too much a disaster for that. Rather, she addresses us collectively.

Cotillard clearly captures this. We watch her watch. We see, in her eyes, the crowd. But she is looking at us, reflecting us in love with Piaf’s song. She may not be Piaf, but Cotillard, in a brilliant stoke, turns us into Piaf’s audience of ardent admirers.

from Monsters & Critics

Paris – Marion Cotillard knows she was not the first choice of the producers to incarnate the legendary French chanson singer Edith Piaf in the critically acclaimed biopic La Vie en Rose.

‘(The producer) drew up a list of possible actresses on which my name did not appear because I am not bankable enough,’ the 32-year- old, Paris-born actress said.

In fact, according to media reports, after director Olivier Dahan chose the Paris-born Cotillard over the internationally known star of The Da Vinci Code and the French smash hit Amelie, Audrey Tautou, one production company substantially cut its funding for the movie.

But Dahan said he had wanted Cotillard from the beginning.

‘There is some resemblance between (Cotillard and Piaf),’ he said. ‘But, beyond the resemblance, I wanted an actress without limits, and it seemed to me that Marion had that in her, even if it had never been exploited before.’

In fact, Cotillard’s performance as Piaf, and the subsequent nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress, has overnight turned her from a second-rank actress with an excellent reputation into a star who, it is assumed, will never again be considered not bankable.

The nomination itself has thrust her into such stellar company as Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani and Simone Signoret, those rare French female performers nominated for Best Actress Oscars. And if she wins, she will become only the second, after Signoret, to win the award.

While Julie Christie is widely considered the favourite for the prize, Cotillard has already amassed an impressive collection of trophies for her performance as Piaf, including the Golden Globe, the British BAFTA, and the film critics awards of London, Boston, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

The acclaim that has come her way is as much recognition of her talent as of the hard work she put into incarnating Piaf, who died in 1963 at the age of 47 after a life of excess, triumph and tragedy – in other words, a perfect life for the cinema.

But Cotillard knew little about the tiny, charismatic powerhouse lovingly known as La Mome (which means The Kid and is the original, French title of the movie; in some English-language markets the film bears the title The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf).

‘I knew some of her songs,’ Cotillard said. ‘I didn’t know much about her life. But her image made me remember my grandmother, who was the same height – one metre 47 centimetres (4 feet 8 inches) – and that gave me something to go on in the film.’

The most difficult aspect of playing the role, she said, was ‘not going over the top into caricature and not doing so little that it would dilute her personality, and therefore her truth. Every day (of the shooting), I walked a tightrope. But, at the same time, it gave me such pleasure!’

According to one of her coaches for the role, Pascal Luneau, Cotillard was the perfect choice to incarnate a personality as volcanic and charismatic as Piaf.

‘She is a physical actress, of the skin, not cerebral,’ he said. ‘She’s an animal that spits, burns itself. And she has so much cheek that she can sing in the streets.’

About the performance, Luneau said, ‘We decided not to imitate Piaf, not to construct the character. But to let Piaf come to her, to accept her, to be inspired by her.’

For this, he said, it was vital that Cotillard ‘not be afraid, that she not be crushed, that she have a real megalomania.’

At the end, Piaf became such a part of Cotillard that the actress found it difficult to shake her off.

‘At the end of the shooting … I noticed that it would not be that easy to – how can I put it? – to leave Edith Piaf and find myself in my own life,’ she said. ‘I returned home, I took up my normal life again, and then I realized that Piaf was not going away, that I was constantly running into signs that sent me back to her.’

Worse, Cotillard said, in talking to people she found herself reacting the way Piaf would have, even using the same intonations.

‘But little by little I returned to my brain, my body, and I no longer had these uncontrollable outbursts of ‘piaferie,’ she said.

Which is just as well, for she has already been cast in two high- profile international films: Rob Marshall’s Nine, a musical based on Fellini’s 8 1/2, where she will sing alongside Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Sophia Loren, and the 1930s gangster film Public Enemies, directed by Michael Mann and starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.

from Premiere.com / by Sophie Grassin and Ghislain Loustalot (Paris), Translation by Courtney Carlsson

Actress in a Leading Role
MARION COTILLARD
LA VIE EN ROSE
Age: 33
Birthplace: Paris, France
Essential Filmography: Taxi (1998); Les Jolies Choses (2001); Jeux d’enfants (Love Me If You Dare) (2003), Big Fish (2003); A Very Long Engagement (2004); A Good Year (2006)

It is all that is being talked about at the moment: her breathtaking performance and her lived rendition. In reincarnating Piaf, not only did Marion Cotillard slip into her little black dress and recapture her cheeky humor, she found the most defining role of her life. Here Cotillard reminisces about this out of the ordinary experience.

What was it like to live with Piaf?
Marion Cotillard: Complicated… but I can describe the experience, or at least, try. Imagine an area that I would have set up to fit me, in which I wouldn’t be able to control anything.

An area, what sort of terrain?
MC: I’m going to give an image. I acted as if I had to throw myself from the top of a slope without controlling the way in which I would roll [down]. Except for the fact that I set everything up with a nice green lawn, that I took away all the trees from my paths and that I used the cliffs or the rocks in order bounce well off them with my little trampoline.

One might say like a video game, right? Super Mario III? [Cotillard laughs] Seriously, how did you determine this scenery?
MC: I free up the necessary space so that someone can come in and slide themselves within me. I do not take anything out. Never, under any circumstances. I co-habit. I make space. My job consists of rummaging about in emotions. Other roles have pushed me to construct characters. Piaf, she, was already there. I just needed to create a space to welcome her. So that she could want to come. But I could not let her submerge me because Olivier Dahan wanted to see me, myself. In the beginning, I wanted to disappear. And then, I became conscious of the fact that I was not hindering, on the contrary: without me, the character could not take life. I refused to become an actress that copied. I never tried to plagiarize her gestures or movements.

What does the work to welcome Piaf consist of?
MC: It’s a progression, a meditation. One session made an impression on me. My coach and I went out into the road, I had sunglasses and I closed my eyes and had to guide him. I instinctively led him to places where the cries of children resonated. Upon reflection, this seemed logical to me. I led him to places where clear and free voices were erupting: it was all Piaf.

Were you afraid before you accepted this role?
MC: Afraid, no. But I had moments of vertigo. I read certain scenes from the script and I wanted to get rid of Piaf. I pulled myself together. I said to myself: “No, look at her well, it will be necessary to.”

In certain singing scenes, it’s your voice that we hear. Was it a challenge?
MC: I sing reasonably, my voice tone is not exceptional. At [Paris] Olympia, where we shot an important scene, I had the feeling that I could sing like Piaf. It was planned that the music would start and that Olivier [Dahan, the director] would cut quickly enough. But I do not take myself too seriously. So, I learnt all of the lyrics to Non, Je ne Regrette Rien. I messed up right in the middle of the take. I persuaded myself that it wasn’t serious, that the scene would be edited. At the same time, someone, let’s call her Edith, took me by the hand and pushed me to go all the way to the end. I regained my concentration and finished well.

Does living without Piaf frighten you?
MC: I am still living with Piaf. I thought that I would collapse after the filming, but no… I told myself that it was cool, that everything would happen gradually. Only, Piaf is still here. I’m having trouble letting go of her. I recognized that I did not want to let her leave, that I feared abandoning her. And then, I reasoned with myself.

What ties you personally with her?
MC: She was my maternal grandmother’s favorite singer. They were the same size. They shared the same character traits. My grandmother always said she would have liked to become a singer, but there was already “la môme” Piaf. This link already existed, before the film, without my being conscious of it. My grandmother, she too, lived an extreme life, marked by great joy and great pain.

How do you see yourself after Piaf?
MC: I spent several unforgettable months with Piaf. She became an old friend. When I hear her on the radio, I feel as if I am being reunited with an old friend. I am not the only actress to experience this. Juliette Binoche, for example, must preserve an intimate rapport with George Sand. All of my life, I will be linked with her. And this gives me great pleasure. It’s not a burden. That being said, I have not filmed anything since. I do not even see myself working. I would really like to throw myself into a different experience. I will therefore definitely do some theatre. I will definitely act one of Racine’s tragedies because I love Phèdre. I finally turned down the first movie that I had committed myself to. I did not want to offer directors a comedian that didn’t have the desire. I believed in their project but I did not believe in myself.

from The Daily Californian / by Louis Peitzman

After appearing in several under-the-radar roles, Marion Cotillard dazzled audiences as Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose.” Cotillard plays a variety of ages throughout the French singer’s life, earning critical praise and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Daily Californian: When you were making “La Vie En Rose,” did you have any idea it was going to be the success that it’s become?

Marion Cotillard: No, when you’re making a movie, you’re just making it, and you don’t think about what could happen. … The passion of all those people created a very special atmosphere. But we wouldn’t talk about this, for fear (of breaking) the spell. But no, you can’t imagine that two years later you will be still talking about the movie, and about to attend the Oscars ceremony.

DC: What was your opinion of Edith Piaf before doing the movie, and how did that change?

MC: Well, I knew a few songs, three or four, that I used to use ? to help me get into a certain emotional state, in other movies. But I didn’t know anything about her life, so I really discovered everything.

DC: When you hear her music now, then, do you have a different appreciation of it?

MC: Not exactly, because I had a very special relationship with three or four of her songs. Because she’s so powerful, emotionally. I discovered more of her work, but I don’t think it changed (the way I felt) about those three or four songs, because I used the songs for other movies. It creates a special relationship with the songs. You have to abandon that special relationship to rediscover the song, but the emotion is still there. It’s so strong.

DC: You play a variety of different ages and periods in Edith Piaf’s life. Which was the most challenging?

MC: There was not a most challenging period. There were two things which were hard. It was the lip synch. And one of the last scenes, when she is about to die-she’s in bed-which was something very special to do. Especially when you know the whole life, it was very special. But nothing was harder than that. (One) period was not harder than another.

DC: What about the lip synching was difficult?

MC: You have to be so accurate. It is so difficult to get, really. And you have to work a lot, and it’s kind of boring at a certain point, because you do the same thing again and again and again. It was not the (most fun)-maybe that’s why it was the hardest part.

DC: Where were you when you found out you’d been nominated for the Academy Award?

MC: I was in Los Angeles, watching the press conference, with my publicist here. My French publicist was traveling with me. I was shocked. I was shocked. I was totally shocked.

DC: With all the recognition that you’ve received for the role, how has your life changed since doing “La Vie En Rose”?

MC: I’ve been traveling for a year and a half. It’s a great and long adventure. I have very little time to see my friends and my family, but they understand that it won’t last forever, and someday I will be able to settle down a little bit, and what’s happening now is bigger than my dreams.

from San Francisco Chronicle / by John McMurtrie

Marion Cotillard has had better days. Looking a bit pale, bundled up in a black cowl-neck sweater and slouching deeply into a sofa, she occasionally reaches for a cup of tea. With any luck, the drink will help fight off a cold that’s left her with a rib-rattling cough.

Behind her, outside the 12th-floor window of a downtown San Francisco hotel, the sky and surroundings are dull gray, streaked with heavy rainfall; it’s not unlike a typical winter day in Paris, which may make the 32-year-old Parisian actress even more homesick. She’s been away from her terre natale for a year and a half, doing publicity for the biopic “La Vie en Rose,” in which she plays Edith Piaf, and she says she longs to be back with her family and friends.

Not that she’s complaining.

“I can’t say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m fed up, baba baba baba,” she says in charmingly accented English, employing her equivalent of yada yada. “If I would say this, I wish someone would say, ‘Eh, hello! Do you know what’s happening to you? Do you know that people would love to be where you are right now?’ ”

Many people would indeed.

Last month, Cotillard won a Golden Globe for her tour de force performance as the tempestuous, hard-living and tragic chanteuse who died at age 47 in 1963. More impressively, she’s been nominated for a best actress Oscar. Astonishingly, in the Academy Awards’ 79-year history, only one actress speaking something other than English (Sophia Loren in 1961′s “Two Women”) has won the award.

Those odds don’t exactly favor Cotillard – and all the talk seems to be about Julie Christie in “Away From Her” – but Cotillard appears genuinely unconcerned about her prospects.

“I don’t think about the chances,” she says with an easy smile. “I want to appreciate the present time and really, to be nominated for an Oscar with a French movie is something so huge that I really don’t want to think about anything else.”

Before “La Vie en Rose,” Cotillard was little known outside France. She starred in the popular action-comedy franchise “Taxi,” but audiences in the States probably remember her best as the vengeful, cunning killer Tina Lombardi in “A Very Long Engagement,” from 2004.

When director Olivier Dahan approached Cotillard to play Piaf, revered as something of a demigoddess in France, she reacted as any sane actress would: “I was freaking out,” she recalls with a laugh, widening her big blue eyes. “I was like, ‘Wow, how can I do this?’

“I don’t have much confidence in myself,” she adds, “but I know one thing which helps me: I can work hard.”

That ethic served Cotillard well for a part that required her to play the diminutive Piaf as a ravaged, shrunken woman aged beyond her years – the actress’ hair and eyebrows were shaved as part of the extensive makeup work. And it meant spending countless hours lip-synching to match Piaf’s style of emotive singing.

As demanding as the role was, Cotillard says, “It was really a big adventure to be her. And I really fell in love with her. The cohabitation – that’s a word? – was going pretty good.

“So when she had to leave,” she adds, laughing, “I was alone.”

A trip to South America helped.

“I traveled in a country I’ve always wanted to go to, which is Peru,” she says. “And it washed myself. My mother went to Peru, and when she came back it was so close to her, so I wanted to go there.”

Both of Cotillard’s parents are stage actors. With their help, she got her start on the boards at age 5. TV roles followed in her teens. A career in acting wasn’t a given, Cotillard says, “but I considered so many things that I told myself maybe the best job to do a lot of jobs is to be an actress.”

Her younger twin brothers are in the arts as well – Guillaume is a writer and Quentin is a sculptor who has lived in the Bay Area for a couple of years.

Cotillard says her parents’ influence motivated her and her brothers to pursue their passions and try to do good in the world.

“My parents always told me that if you want something, you can do whatever you have to do to get it,” she says. “As long as it’s not against someone else.”

Cotillard may love acting, but listening to her, she’s most lively when discussing global inequality and threats to the environment. “There are chemicals everywhere,” she says, “and I track.” (At one point she rattles off an impressive list of scary-sounding chemicals that can be found in household products.)

A friend tired enough of hearing Cotillard simply complain about the state of the world and encouraged the actress to become an activist. She met with people from Greenpeace, and when she has the time, speaks on behalf of the organization.

In the meantime, however, there’s plenty of work to be done in Hollywood.

It was recently announced that Cotillard will play Billie Frechette, moll of the infamous bank robber John Dillinger – played by Johnny Depp – in “Public Enemies.” Michael Mann (“Heat,” “Collateral”) will direct.

Cotillard is already nervous about the film, and no, it has nothing to do with getting cozy with Depp, whom she met for the first time only a few days ago.

“When I see what I have to do with this movie, ‘La Vie en Rose’ is a piece of cake,” she says, laughing. “There’s no way she [Billie] has a French accent.”

Then comes “Nine,” in which Cotillard, Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Sophia Loren will star in an adaptation of the Broadway musical. Directed by Rob Marshall (“Chicago”), the film will give Cotillard the chance to actually sing, and not just move her lips, as she did in “La Vie en Rose.”

She can’t wait.

“If I had to go back to the lip sync – pfft!” She throws her hands up. “O la la, it is so hard to do. And to do the same again and again and again and again and again – at a certain point it’s just boring.”

from USA Today / by Donna Freydkin

Marion Cotillard’s idea of a perfect way to spend an afternoon?

“Going to a museum. I love it. I think the last exhibit I saw was two years ago, here, in Santa Monica. So yeah, it has been quite a long time,” she says. “I don’t remember when I was home and had fun. I’m never in Paris. I haven’t been in Paris in so long.”

She can blame her breakthrough performance as legendary French singer Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, which has transformed the delicate French character actress into an awards circuit darling. And though all the attention is a bit jarring, Cotillard, 32, isn’t complaining.

Sure, Cotillard says in her accented but careful English, she’s “busy. Very busy. But it’s not busy forever. All this great news every day is something very, very special.”

And then, Cotillard does something an American actress would never dream of. She lifts up her hands and actually points out the tiny laugh lines around her mouth.

“I have some wrinkles here because I was smiling so much. The opportunity to share that movie like this — it has been amazing.”

But sharing the movie has meant flying all over the world both to promote it and to collect the prizes it has picked up. And that bugs Cotillard, an avid environmentalist who drives a Prius in Paris, travels to premieres and galas in hybrid vehicles and buys carbon credits when she flies.

“I try to do my best because I feel guilty,” Cotillard says. “The waste in Paris is unbelievable. Because I was living by myself also, I started to wonder about all this paper that’s falling in the trash can — I felt bad. That’s how I started to become that way. I always want to understand and know what I’m eating and what I’m buying.”

She applied that same hunger for information when she prepped to play Piaf, an abandoned urchin who became France’s most storied chanteuse. Along the way, Piaf’s only child died, and so did the great love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan. She became a heavy user of morphine. She drank. But on stage, she still sparkled.

Playing the French national treasure, who in her personal life wasn’t quite the petite jewel she was on stage and who died from cancer in 1963 at 47, wasn’t what intimidated Cotillard.

“I was terrified by the fact that I’d have to play a woman from age 19 to 47,” she says. “I was busy having stress with playing an old lady who was 47 looking 80.”

In person, Cotillard is flawless, with refined features and creamy skin. When she was playing the older, haggard, largely hairless Piaf, a woman ravaged by hard living and disease, Cotillard spent five hours in makeup each day. And she spent an hour each night removing all that latex and glue. Even more irritating? How she would slip into Piaf’s husky voice after she wrapped the film.

“It was not annoying for my friends; it was unbearable for me. She is someone who is very, very extreme, who has a very strong character, and when it stops, it took me a little while (to let it go).

“Well, not so little, I have to confess. When I shot the movie, off the set, my voice was more the voice of the character than mine. It took a little while for it to go up again.”

Does Cotillard ever worry that fame might lead her to become as demanding a diva as Piaf?

“She was tyrannical. You have to understand why someone can be mean. It comes from somewhere. She was abandoned as a child. Her biggest fear was to be alone. My childhood wasn’t like that. I don’t have that fear of being alone. I’m not afraid to be alone. I need sometimes to be alone.”

The few times she has been back in Paris, she has noticed how her life has changed.

“People recognize me a lot more than before. I can handle that, really. What I live is so intense and so magical that I can’t complain about anything.”

Spending the past few weeks in the USA has been something of a culture shock for Cotillard. One thing that has been particularly jarring is the media’s endless focus on the travails of Britney Spears.

“I never watch TV, but now that I’m here, I watch it, and it’s all about Britney,” she says. “I love Toxic. She has some great songs. I listen to Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Radiohead, some classical music. A lot of things, actually. The ones who stayed for a long time.”

It’s appropriate, then, that after she finishes Public Enemies with Johnny Depp, she’ll begin Rob Marshall’s musical Nine.

“My dream, since I was a child, is to do a musical. I never thought it was possible,” she says before quickly amending her comment: “I never thought it was not possible, either. That’s maybe what keeps the door open to magic.”

Cotillard has been around, but you might not know it

by Mike Clark

As French singer and onetime national institution Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, Marion Cotillard elevates an unwieldy biographical drama that’s predictably heavy on heartbreak. It’s a performance within hailing distance of the genre’s gold standard: Judy Davis and Tammy Blanchard in 2001′s Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows.

Cotillard has a career stretching back 15 years — mostly in French theatrical and TV films, of which only a handful are on DVD. And her screen looks are so chameleonic that Rose admirers may not even recognize her from the handful of her movies that got significant U.S. distribution.

Here are two high-profile jewels and one undeservedly low box-office performer that are readily gettable:

• Big Fish (2003, Sony, PG-13, $15; Blu-ray, $29). Coming off his worst movie (Planet of the Apes), director Tim Burton rebounded with one of his best. Albert Finney plays a lovable-to-some blowhard whose tall tales alienate his exasperated son (Billy Crudup). Cotillard plays Crudup’s wife (eventually very pregnant) and strikes an emotional chord with the old man, launching more yarn-spinning. This one’s about his courtship of Crudup’s mom (Alison Lohman and then Jessica Lange, brilliantly cast).

• A Very Long Engagement (2004, Warner, R, $20). Appallingly, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s visually resplendent Amelie didn’t get 2001′s foreign-language Oscar despite five nominations overall. But his equally handsome follow-up, also starring Amelie lead Audrey Tatou, was almost as good. Cotillard appears relatively late in a small role she bit into hard enough to win a Cesar (France’s Oscar). As an imprisoned prostitute, she provides Tatou with a key clue to unveiling the shady mystery that led to her fiancé’s death in World War I.

• A Good Year (2006, Fox, PG-13, $20). Modestly delectable but ignored or put down by both critics and the public, the movie of Peter Mayle’s novel reunited Gladiator’s Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott for two hours of good food, fine wine, shady trees and classy women. Cotillard, quite alluring, is the restaurateur who, after a bad start, captures investment banker Crowe’s imagination after his workaholic finds himself gradually seduced by a Provence vineyard.

from The Associated Press / by David Germain

Marion Cotillard’s first acting job was a baffling but valuable lesson in the art of denying real life in favour of make-believe.

She was three or four and playing a girl whose mother lay dead before her. Cotillard, an Academy Award nominee for “La Vie En Rose,” could not understand why the director insisted the actress playing the dead woman was her mother, when her actual mom was right there on stage with her, playing a different woman.

“I remember he said to me, ‘It’s your mother,’ and in my head, I was like, ‘She’s not my mother, because my mother is there!’ ” Cotillard said with an emphatic gesture as she recalled her first stage gig in an interview with The Associated Press. “It was so disturbing. I really remember this feeling I had.”

The French actress had made great leaps forward in her craft a year or two later, the first time she worked on a TV movie, and she was doing a scene with a dog. In real life, Cotillard did not have a dog, but she now understood the game.

“The dog, it didn’t belong to me, but it was my dog. They say, ‘It’s your dog,’ ” Cotillard said. “I went, ‘OK, it’s my dog.’ I got it then.”

Cotillard, 32, really gets it today. She put in a remarkable performance as Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose,” playing the French singer from her raw, fiery late teens through her frail last days in her 40s.

It was a breakout role for Cotillard, whose French credits include producer Luc Besson’s action comedy “Taxi” and its sequels and the acclaimed “A Very Long Engagement,” and who appeared in such Hollywood productions as Tim Burton’s “Big Fish” and Ridley Scott’s “A Good Year.”

Two more Hollywood films are coming up, with Cotillard co-starring with Johnny Depp in Michael Mann’s 1930s crime tale “Public Enemies” and with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz in Rob Marshall’s “Nine,” a musical inspired by Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2.”

In “Public Enemies,” Cotillard is playing the moll of gangster John Dillinger (Depp), a role requiring her to sound like an American.

“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,” said Cotillard, who speaks good English but does have a heavy French accent.

Though her parents were actors and she had an early introduction to the profession, the Paris-born Cotillard had what she calls a fairly normal upbringing, taking on only occasional acting jobs.

Cotillard began acting in earnest in her late teens, her stunning looks, huge blue eyes and disarming mix of sweetness and sauciness helping to establish her.

Her eyes helped land the role as Piaf. Cotillard said when she first met with “La Vie En Rose” director Olivier Dahan, there was a list of three potential actresses to play Piaf. She was not on it.

But she later learned from Dahan that he started to fixate on her for the role after finding a book on Piaf in a shop. Something about Piaf’s eyes in a photo from when she was about 16 reminded him of Cotillard.

Cotillard had only passing awareness of Piaf beforehand.

“I was not a huge fan. Of course, I know her. I’m French,” Cotillard said.

“I knew a few songs but nothing about her life, whereas in her time, everybody knew her life, because she shared her life with the press. When she had an accident, there were pictures taken of her in the hospital room. Everybody knew where she was, what she was doing, who she was dating.

“But all I knew were a few songs she wrote, songs that are still very, very alive. In all those ‘American Idols,’ all those TV shows with very, very young people who sing, you hear people sing Piaf.”

As with Jamie Foxx, an Oscar winner for his portrayal of Ray Charles in “Ray,” Cotillard had to learn a difficult art for the music biography: how to lip-sync. French singer Jil Aigrot provided the distinctive warble of Piaf, best known for the title song and such tunes as “Mon Dieu,” “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and “C’est L’amour.”

Pretending that Aigrot’s prerecorded vocals were coming from her own mouth was the major challenge for Cotillard, who spent long hours trying to capture Piaf’s expressions and body language.

“It’s the toughest thing, a lot of work, not the funnest. It’s long and hard. But you have to do it,” Cotillard said. “It has to be almost perfect, because the audience has to believe that you are actually singing, because you play a singer. It’s your voice, it’s the character’s voice.”

The film follows Piaf from impoverished childhood as a street singer abandoned by her mother through international stardom and the infirmities of her final years, when the will to sing remained even as her body was giving out.

While Piaf goes from bawdy urchin to commanding celebrity to feeble woman grown old before her time, Cotillard said the singer’s essence was the same throughout.

“You will always carry what you lived in your childhood, because it’s what creates what is in you,” Cotillard said. “That’s what was beautiful in her, the strong woman she was, and at the same time the little girl. The little girl who needs to be protected, to be loved, and more than loved, because I think when you’re abandoned, you will search for love all your life. And maybe you won’t find it, because you will never find your mother’s love.”

Actors usually find themselves doing interviews for a film around the release date, then putting it behind them and moving on to something else.

Not so with “La Vie En Rose, which debuted a year ago in Europe and has long since been released elsewhere and on DVD.

“I’ve never talked about a movie and a character for so long, especially since the movie’s been released everywhere,” Cotillard said. “It is strange. It’s long, but I’m happy for the movie.”

from People.com

PEOPLE caught up with the La Vie En Rose star who dished about the secret to her style, gorgeous gems, her attitude about being an Oscar nominee at a recent Chopard-sponsored celebration of Marion Cotillard’s Best Actress Oscar nomination. Although the Gallic beauty is known for her distinctive sense of style, she admits she doesn’t do it alone — but don’t expect any Hollywood stylists waiting in the wings. Instead, the actress reveals that she relies on “My French publicist, who is one of my best friends. He does all that stuff!” And Cotillard was the picture of refined French elegance in a flower embellished strapless Chloe dress set off with a wealth of Chopard gems, including 50-carats of diamonds circling her wrist and a collar at her neck encrusted with a rainbow of semi-precious stones. As for her partnership with Chopard, “They’ve always supported me from the beginning,” she says. When asked about words of wisdom she’s been given about the Oscars, the star says she agrees with the advice George Clooney gave to her fellow nominee Amy Ryan. “‘It will be over in a minute. When the awards are done, they’re done, everyone goes back’” he said. “‘So just to enjoy it and don’t be too frightened.’” Somehow, though, we have a feeling this year’s Oscars won’t be the talented actress’s only chance to shine.

from Rotten Tomatoes / by Alex Vo

The French actress discusses her future plans, including movies and awards season.

There’s worse ways to achieve household name status than by acting out Edith Piaf’s life story. Marion Cotillard’s roles in A Very Long Engagement and Ridley Scott’s box office flop A Good Year gave her recognition in certain filmgoing circles, but its Cotillard’s total transformation in La Vie en Rose as the French singer, now out on DVD, that has drawn unanimous praise from critics and audiences alike, culminating with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. We caught up with the actress in San Francisco, chatting about Edith Piaf’s impact on contemporary France, and Cotillard’s upcoming projects, including Nine, a remake of 8½ by Rob Marshall.

Previously, you’ve said that your roles in the Taxi movies made it difficult to be taken seriously as an actress. Does the Oscar and Cesar nominations for La Vie en Rose validate your efforts?

Marion Cotillard: I had my validation before this. Taxis are very big commercial movies and in France, in the business, they’re not so serious. So you have to prove that you’re an actor. I think “it” happened when I did the Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie, A Very Long Engagement. The role [was] fantastic. And they gave me a Cesar for nine minutes in the film. So that changed everything for me.

America has mostly recognized La Vie en Rose for your performance, while France is more recognizing the movie as a whole.

MC: I’m so happy that the movie was successful in France, that it was successful here, that it was successful almost everywhere we released it. That’s what is exciting. And it’s going to be exciting to have 11 Cesar nominations. Of course, also very exciting to have the Oscar nomination. You don’t expect to be at the Oscars for a French movie. Let’s say that having an Oscar nomination is very special and more unique than a Cesar.

Beyond the script, when did everyone know they had something big on their hands?

MC: When we finished the movie in May 2006 and showed 10 minutes in Cannes. The buzz was huge after those 10 minutes. And it never went down. That was five months before the movie was to be released so it was a very long time ago.

Even on the set we knew something was going on. There was something very special about the movie that we couldn’t share exactly. [We couldn't] say this at that time because you don’t want to break the spell.

Did that happen with previous movies?

MC: It’s hard to compare. It was the first time I’ve jumped and dived [into a role].

For La Vie en Rose, you didn’t do much rehearsing. Is that typical?

MC: It depends on the role. I don’t stick to special techniques, conscious techniques. I let myself instinctively go [and find the] best way to work. So it changes all the time.

Your family encouraged creativity and the arts. Did the instinctual process come from that upbringing?

MC: Yeah! Every story is different, every movie is different, every director is different. That’s what I like so I couldn’t work with the same technique all the time.

What kind of music do you listen to when you prepare to act?

MC: It depends on the character. When I have a character I have a playlist. I’ve used Piaf for three movies. It’s a little bit of classical music, it’s a little bit of Radiohead. Songs you couldn’t imagine that I would listen to. Songs that I loved as a teenager that moved me.

What influence does Edith Piaf have on contemporary French culture?

MC: We have the American Idols. And we have several shows on TV with young people who sing and every year they sing Piaf. I think that emotion and good stories can cross the times. And her songs probably cross the times.

You were recently cast in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. What can you say about that?

MC: What I can tell you [is that] what I have to do in that movie makes La Vie en Rose seem like a piece of cake.

What’s the status on Nine? Was it shut down by the strike?

MC: I think they’ve gone back to work because they have a waiver. I hope we can shoot that at the end of the year.

Now that you have American movies coming out, what kind of roles are you searching for here?

MC: I’m looking for good stories. But I don’t have at the present time a specific desire. What I need is to do something totally different, each time. That’s what I love.

Which sort of directors are you looking to work with?

MC: A lot. But I can’t say names. [Laughs.]

from 7x7sf.com / by Liam Mayclem

French actress Marion Cotillard is not a household name … yet. But her Oscar-nominated performance in La Vie En Rose, playing the late French chanteuse Edith Piaf, is nothing short of brilliant. She deserves to take home the Oscar, and then the whole world will know of this bright, young acting talent.

I met the delightful French actress for 7 questions for 7×7.

1. Marion Cotillard, welcome to San Francisco. What are your first impressions of our mad, fab city?

Marion Cotillard: My brother, he lives here. It’s not the first time I’ve come here, and it’s not going to be the last. I love that there are sidewalks, and you can walk in the streets. It’s very green. I love the shape of the snake streets also.

2. Your life has been somewhat of a roller coaster ride since taking on La Vie en Rose and playing Edith Piaf. Has it been a joy ride?

MC: Well, Mmm. I spend maybe a month in France in two years, so I am far from home. It has been an amazing adventure, but it changed a lot of things.

3. How would you describe your relationship with Hollywood, if at all?

MC: I feel welcome in Hollywood, and the welcome I have is so beautiful.

4. You have a golden voice, and you must have some musical heroes. Who are the musicians or the artists that have inspired you?

MC: Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Radiohead and Serge Gainsbourg.

LM: That’s a good mixture. I would like to hear all of them harmonising in a musical remix.

MC: Oh wow, unfortunately. Well maybe Radiohead can sing Joplin and Redding and Gainsbourg, but they are dead.

5. Is there a movie you watched growing up that inspired you to act?

MC: Well, actually it was not a movie. Some movies like Annie, Jan Houston I mean she was, I was close to her age when I saw the movie. It was a musical, and I have always loved musicals. So maybe it would be Annie. But I admire Gretta Garbo.

6. The Oscars are coming up, congratulations on your nomination. Has anyone given you any good advice about how to prepare for the big day?

MC: No not yet, but I am pretty relaxed. You know, it’s a huge thing to be there, so I think that the advice I would give to myself is to have fun.

7. Finally, please complete the sentence for me: Acting to me is about…?

MC: Sharing emotions and telling beautiful stories.

from Men’s Vogue / by Damian Fowler

Marion Cotillard goes beyond beauty to conjure the mythic Edith Piaf – and it just might land her an Oscar.

Don’t bother trying to sum up Marion Cotillard. That’s the lesson I recently learned when, in my desire to understand the essence of the 32-year-old French actress, I stooped to the following: What color are your eyes? “Blue-gray” came her playful response in gentle, articulate English. “It depends on the weather. When it’s like this — rainy — my eyes are gray. But when the sun is shining, then my eyes are blue.” I should have known better than to bottle a rainbow.

The iridescent Cotillard secured an Oscar nomination for her remarkable transformation into the iconic French chanteuse Edith Piaf in last year’s “La Vie En Rose.” Critics have used terms like “impassioned,” “spellbinding,” and (of course) “tour de force” to describe her achievement. At 5-foot-7, the long-limbed, vivacious actress managed to transmogrify herself into the petite, birdlike but volatile Piaf. Deploying rag-doll body language and a rasping delivery — neither of which is manifest at our table at Nello on Madison Avenue — Cotillard captured the physicality of Piaf, from her early days as a street-singing soubrette to her later years as the grande dame of French music, crippled by arthritis and addicted to morphine. The actress had to shave her hairline and her eyebrows to become La Môme Piaf — “the kid sparrow.” Thankfully, it’s all grown back. Her beauty is intact.

Although Cotillard has been acting for more than 14 years (including a recent turn as Russell Crowe’s love interest in “A Good Year”), the accolades she received for her performance in “La Vie En Rose” have changed everything. She’s just flown in from Los Angeles: Hollywood is calling.

Cotillard takes a sip of fresh orange juice and reflects on the singer who inspired this life-changing performance. “My desire was not to try to imitate her technically,” she says of Piaf, who died of cancer in 1963 at age 47. “I wanted to understand what was inside that woman, what was inside her heart and soul.” To do so, Cotillard front-loaded her brain with all things Piaf until she was brimming with her ineffable essence. She also befriended the singer’s old friend Ginou Richer, who revealed that Piaf wasn’t such a tragic figure after all. “She loved life, she loved to be happy, and she was funny,” Cotillard says.

As for the singing, director Olivier Dahan knew it would be impossible for anyone to re-create Piaf’s voice. Instead, Cotillard lip-synced, an intricate process that required learning to breathe precisely like the late singer. Even before she got her Oscar-worthy role, the actress would create playlists of Piaf’s songs for various movies she worked on. “I use the music,” she tells me. “It helps me to go into certain emotions. But I don’t use my job as therapy. I feel more like an anthropologist of the inside of the human being, a speleologist!” she says with a glint of mischief in her — suddenly — blue eyes. Say what?

I nod in agreement, and when I get home, I look up speleologist: someone who visits caves. Of course.

from Entertainment’s Weekly / by Missy Schwartz

BEST ACTRESS: MARION COTILLARD

La Vie en Rose

Age 32 Role Legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf. Karaoke Dreamin’ As a teenager in Orléans, France, Cotillard used to lip-synch to Madonna’s ”Material Girl.” ”With my microphone, I was the pop star of my bedroom!” she laughs. That clowning turned out to be good practice for her uncanny performance in La Vie, which she approached with scientific precision: ”I took all the songs and I calculated the length of the notes, of the silences, and how she would breathe. Then I did it again and again and again.” Up Next She sings — for real this time — in Rob Marshall’s Nine, based on the Broadway musical adapted from Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2.

from Vanity Fair Daily / by S.T. VanAirsdale

Over at his blog And the Winner Is…, Oscar prognosticator Scott Feinberg lays out an interesting case for La Vie en Rose star Marion Cotillard as a serious contender in this year’s Best Actress race. Not that anyone has written her off (God knows we haven’t), but let’s face it: Among Academy voters, a performance for the ages is often no match for sentimental favorites (Julie Christie, Away From Her) or precociousness (Ellen Page, Juno). Roll back the star power a few notches, add a foreign language, and just like that, you’re an also-ran.

Except for Cotillard, whose turn as Edith Piaf spans about 30 years and just as many pounds of wigs and makeup as the iconic singer careens toward heartbreak, illness, revival, and death. As Feinberg notes, the Academy loves this kind of cultivated ugliness—almost as much as it loves actresses around Cotillard’s age (32), singer biopics (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Walk the Line) and winners of other seasonal hardware (she did claim a Golden Globe). Apparently even Oprah is rooting for her, an endorsement that may have more influence on DVD sales than Oscar votes but nevertheless represents an important populist bellwether.

I’ll add a less obvious X-factor to Feinberg’s analysis, however: Look out for Bob Berney, the Picturehouse boss whose company distributed La Vie en Rose and who, as the president of Newmarket Films, almost single-handedly guided Charlize Theron to Golden Globe and Oscar wins in 2003 for her feral, fearless performance as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. He also coaxed a nod that year for 13-year-old Whale Rider star Keisha Castle Hughes, making her the youngest Best Actress nominee in Oscar history. Berney is a genius with this stuff, a grass-roots guy whose acumen behind the scenes may not be infallible (Picturehouse’s 2006 foreign-language nominee Pan’s Labyrinth was arguably the year’s biggest surprise loser) but is hardly worth betting against.

His method is not entirely dissimilar to that of Fox Searchlight, which pushed Juno to its four nominations on the basis of a phenomenon as opposed to the all-inclusive technical merits of films like No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood. In fact, La Vie en Rose is a thoroughly unremarkable film with only Cotillard’s work to recommend it; like Monster and the recent Best Actress winners Monster’s Ball and Walk the Line before it, it has merely been seasoned with Oscar bait, not made from it. Which, as this category’s history indicates, may be all it needs to win.

Bob Berney hardly invented this paradigm, but his selectivity, taste, and—this is important—campaign moderation make Cotillard both a front-runner and backlash-proof. For further evidence look to Away From Her distributor Lionsgate, which is cribbing Berney’s strategy in its push on Christie’s behalf. Its advantage: The industry loves this woman, who is edging toward retirement. Its disadvantage: It loves her so much that she’s already won an Oscar. So count me among the Cotillard true believers; there’s a higher power than hype at work here.

from The Associated Press / by Michael Cidoni

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – All of hot young Hollywood is not in this room, but it sure feels that way. Posing for photos on an antique sofa are Casey Affleck, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Amy Ryan, and James McAvoy: four first-time Oscar-nominated actors, and the leading man of an Oscar-nominated Best Picture contender.

They gathered here Wednesday night for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s first-annual celebration of “Virtuosos,” these rising stars of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (Affleck), “La Vie en rose” (Cotillard), “Juno” (Page), “Gone Baby Gone” (Ryan) and “Atonement” (McAvoy).

In an exclusive sit-down interview, AP Television spoke with the five before they received their fest honors.

AP: So, what was your first reaction when they said, ‘You’re one of The Virtuosos! Come to Santa Barbara?’

(Laughter…)

Affleck: I said, ‘Where’s Santa Barbara?’

McAvoy: Like the soap opera? Excellent! I wondered, ‘Can there only be five (virtuosos) in the entire world? Wow, that’s incredible.’ (Turning to Ryan) How did you feel?

Ryan: I was very excited, too. I was very excited by the other four virtuosos, as well. Very good company.

AP: You all seem quite familiar with each other. Do you hang? (More laughter from all.)

McAvoy: We all go WAY back, don’t we? (Laughs.) It’s kind of like The Brat Pack that never was.

Page: We met in October. Octoberish.

Ryan: Marion and I met on the airplane from Chicago. Casey? Just met.

(More laughs, as the two starred together in “Gone Baby Gone.”)

AP: How has the writers strike affected your take on awards season? Has it taken the edge off?

Ryan: It’s added to the excitement. It’s still a nail-biter, if it’s gonna happen or not. But it’s also put it in perspective for me. I feel like, at the end of the day, people’s livelihoods are more important than dressing up, or maybe or maybe not getting an award. So, I just hope it settles and the writers get their due, and we all get to enjoy a big night. So, I kind of want it both ways. Is that too bad?

Page: And like you said the other night, you were like, ‘Yeah. A lot of people get nominated for Oscars, but a lot of Oscars you kind of forget. But we’ll always be THAT year.’

Ryan: Right. We’re in the year where it almost didn’t happen. Or it didn’t happen.

AP: What’s the worst part of working the awards circuit?

McAvoy: I was speaking to an actor who has been though this entire thing this year … he said that when you make films that you’re proud of, like, I think, everybody here, at the moment. And you have an incredible experience. You have an adventure. And you come away with all these incredible stories. But at the end of (awards season), it seems the only reason you had those adventure was so you were able to tell the stories in situations like this. And it just cancels the whole point. It feels like you have reversed the whole point of doing it.

AP: Now, c’mon. Isn’t anyone loving getting dressed up and having their picture taken? Ellen?

Page: If I had say what my top five favorite things are in the world to do, (walking the carpet) might … it may just miss out on the list. But just by a little. (Laughs from the other four actors.) So, but, I understand that that’s a part of it, that it’s a part of being a part of this, and it’s a huge gift to be a part of this. And it’s something that people really strive for. And we’ve all really gotten a role that has lead to, basically, this moment.

AP: And what do you think you’ll most remember about this time of your life?

Cotillard: I would say all the people I’ve met, and all the people I’ve talked with to share that work you’re talking about. In France, we’re not used to meeting so many people because there’s not such a sha-bah-dah about this.

Page: I’ve gotta say, it’s kind of the same (for me). It’s extremely humbling to find yourself in situations where it’s run of the mill to see Daniel Day-Lewis, you know? What’s going on in your life when THAT happens?

Ryan: I would also add, one thing about the awards circuit is that you’re kept so busy there’s not really a chance to take a breath, and really take it in and wonder how you do feel. So I’ve been enjoying watching my family for the first time, take it in. It’s the first time that, you know … they’ve celebrated things for my career. But this is as much for the home team.

Affleck: (It’s all made me) feel a little more part of a group of people, more connected to everyone who’s in the same industry. It can be so alienating when you’re just in your house and with the people you know and you don’t get to meet all these people.

from Marin Independent Journal / by Paul Liberatore

Marion Cotillard, whose transcendent portrayal of the tragic French chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose” earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress, made a hastily arranged appearance in Marin this week, charming an adoring audience at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center.

Casually dressed in black jeans and a sparkly top, the 32-year-old French actress – fresh from winning a Golden Globe – took the stage for an interview and audience questions after a screening of the movie, which is up for three Academy Awards.

Tuesday night was the third time I’ve seen “La Vie en Rose,” and the uncanny way that Cotillard inhabits the character of the “Little Bird,” as Piaf was affectionately known – playing her from age 17 to her death at 47, a casualty of alcohol and morphine – astounded me all over again.

I kept looking at this fresh-faced young woman with shining brown hair tumbling over her shoulders and couldn’t imagine how she could transform herself into the troubledagic Piaf, a character who aged shockingly and prematurely during the course of the film, going from a hard-living Parisian street singer to a successful but tormented version of a French Billie Holiday and, finally, becoming a stooped, drug-addled crone at the end of her too-short life. She had me dabbing my eyes and shaking my head in amazement.

I’m in pretty good company in this. Here’s what Stephen Holden had to say in the New York Times: “Marion Cotillard’s feral portrait of the French singer Edith Piaf as a captive wild animal hurling herself at the bars of her cage is the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another I’ve ever encountered in a film.” The director (but not of this movie) Trevor Nunn called it “one of the greatest performances on film ever.”

Tuesday night’s event, for California Film Institute members, came together at a moment’s notice, arranged last week at Sundance. The Rafael had already shown “La Vie en Rose” for 10 weeks last May and June, including a screening with director Olivier Dahan. And it’s now out on DVD. A show of hands Tuesday night confirmed that just about everyone there had already seen the movie at least once.

So why did Cotillard decide to come to Marin now for one screening? As soon as I got a few moments with her, that’s the first thing I asked. And, wouldn’t you know, there’s a local angle. She loves to have live dialogues with fans (something missing from a movie set), so she decided at the 11th hour to make the Rafael appearance while she was in Marin visiting family.

“My brother married an American,” she explained with a laugh, indicating Quentin Cotillard, who was sitting in the row behind us with his wife, Elaine O’Malley Cotillard, a former Dutch National Ballet dancer who grew up in Marin and is now a San Francisco fashion designer.

“The character on the screen is not the same person you have a glass of wine with,” Elaine said of her sister-in-law. “There are scenes when she’s just astounding.”

Elaine’s mother, Laura O’Malley of San Rafael, told me that even though she thinks of Marion as her own daughter, when she’s on the screen, “I forget it’s her up there.”

I interviewed the director John Sayles this week about his new movie, “Honeydripper,” coming to the Rafael later this month, and in the course of our conversation, Cotillard came up. He asked me if she’s as small as she looks in the movie. She isn’t. She explained that she just wills herself to look and feel that way.

On Tuesday night, the first thing Richard Peterson, director of programming for the Rafael, wanted to know was how she managed to pull this transformation off? Was it makeup? Smoke? Mirrors? A combination of all three.

“I don’t look like her, I hope, although I think she’s beautiful,” she said in her sweetly unsteady English. “I was very scared because I chose a special way to work on that movie. I didn’t want to rehearse. I wanted to build something inside me. My only aim was to understand her. I didn’t want to have her voice, I didn’t want to behave like her or look like her. I just wanted to understand her heart, her soul. That’s what I searched for.”

She invested a lot of time watching movies of Piaf, listening to her speak and sing, she explained, “but without trying to be her.”

Then, 10 days before she was to begin shooting in Prague, she started having second thoughts. She cracked up the crowd when she pretended to anxiously chew on her hand.

“I thought to myself, ‘Maybe you chose the wrong way. Maybe you should do it the classic acting way,’” she said. “It was risky, I know, but I like surprises. And I wanted to have surprises, I didn’t want to control everything.”

Cotillard acknowledged that she’s up against some formidable competition for the Academy Award in fellow nominees: Ellen Page for “Juno”; Cate Blanchett for “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”; Laura Linney for “The Savages”; and Julie Christie, the sentimental favorite, for “Away from Her.”

And being a relative unknown in a foreign film works against her, which she well knows.

“You don’t think about an Oscar when you shoot a French movie,” she said with a smile. “This is bigger than my biggest dream.”

Any other year, I’d be rooting for Julie Christie, one of the great actresses of my generation. But Cotillard’s brilliant performance is such a tour de force that she truly deserves to win. And, besides, she has family here, which almost makes her a hometown girl.

from The Telegraph (UK) / by Strawberry Saroyan

When the director of ‘La Vie en Rose’ cast a virtual unknown as Edith Piaf he struck gold – for the mesmerising Marion Cotillard looks set to add an Oscar to the string of awards she’s already won for the role. Not bad considering this particular Little Sparrow decided to wing it without so much as a rehearsal. She talks to Strawberry Saroyan

I am in the palatial restaurant of a Beverly Hills hotel, waiting for the woman hotly tipped to win this year’s best actress Oscar and Bafta, Marion Cotillard. She is late and I want to make sure that the staff will know where to direct her when she arrives, so I approach the maître d’. ‘I’m interviewing an actress,’ I say in my – hopefully – least annoying cadence. I mention Cotillard’s name. ‘I don’t know who that is,’ the woman replies dismissively. ‘Oh. She was in La Vie en Rose… playing Edith Piaf…’ I trail off. The woman snaps to attention. ‘Wow,’ she exclaims. ‘I did see that. It was good but very disturbing.’

It’s a reaction Cotillard and the film – a biopic of the French singer Piaf – have been eliciting for close to two years, since La Vie en Rose was released (it came out in Britain last June). Indeed, when her Golden Globe win for best actress in a musical or comedy was announced last month the Boston Globe retorted, ‘Marion who?’ It’s not a question many more people will be asking. In the weeks before we meet Cotillard has been named best actress by the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Hollywood Film Festival, and she has just been nominated for best actress in the forthcoming Bafta awards. The director Trevor Nunn called hers ‘one of the greatest performances on film ever’.

La Vie en Rose follows Piaf through her life, which included being abandoned by her mother as a toddler, raised in a brothel after her father abandoned her, too, blinded by conjunctivitis (she later regained her sight) and implicated in the murder of the man who discovered her, before finally losing the love of her life in a plane crash. By the time Piaf died of morphine and alcohol addiction at 47 (but looking 70), her divine gift of a voice hardly seemed a fair karmic trade-off.

When Cotillard arrives at the restaurant she is all apologies. ‘Sorry, sorry!’ she says and waves her hands. Dressed in skinny jeans, silver kitten heels and a T-shirt emblazoned with dozens of fading little stars, the 32-year-old oozes Parisian chic in that just-rolled-out-of-bed way. Her transformation into Piaf becomes even more startling when you learn that she is a foot taller than the singer was and has a delicate prettiness that is hidden behind the feral rage and humour she projects as the woman known as the Little Sparrow. (When I ask Cotillard if she gets recognised from the role in America she throws me a look. ‘I look quite different,’ she says.)

Cotillard speaks in charmingly broken English. She refers to memories as souvenirs, for example – simply using the French word instead – and told one reporter that a promising film deal ‘smelled good’. When I ask about the pressure she might have felt portraying Piaf, who is revered in France, Cotillard tells me, ‘I knew I couldn’t go into the wall.’ Huh? ‘It’s a translation of a French expression.’ I realise she means she couldn’t afford to mess up. ‘Really when you read a role like this you can’t fail. It’s too precious.’

I have read that Cotillard didn’t want to do rehearsals. She jumps right in. ‘I did not want to do a classic way of working that people can imagine – trying to find the old lady inside me [she plays the singer from youth to her death] or trying to find the voice of Piaf, the way she walked.’ In fact, time constraints made it impossible for Cotillard to learn to sing. Instead, she lip-synched expertly to original Piaf recordings or, where they were not available, to the singer Jil Aigrot. ‘I chose to keep, erm, surprises,’ she continues. ‘I wanted to build something inside me, and hoped that from the inside the outside would come naturally.’ She made the risky choice of not practising at all before arriving on set. ‘Ten days before going to start the movie I freaked out, totally,’ she admits. ‘I was like, “Maybe I should have [prepared in a more] classic way.”‘

Little clues she was on to something carried her through – ‘We did the costume fittings in London and immediately I felt that my body would behave like someone else’ – but she couldn’t relax until she heard herself speaking as the character during the first day of filming. After that it was plain sailing. ‘I really fell in love with her,’ she says, adding that the hardest part was letting go of the role after filming ended. ‘First of all, when you go back to your life you’re alone again. You lived for more than seven months – four and a half months of shooting and three months of preparation – with the character, so it’s like you have to mourn.’

Cotillard speaks in equally dramatic and effusive terms about her acting idols, some of whom she has met recently in Los Angeles – she lives in Paris but is over on an extended stay for the awards. She was overwhelmed when Daniel Day-Lewis presented her with the Breakthrough Performance trophy at the Palm Springs International Film Festival some weeks ago. ‘More than the fact that I admire him, I really think he’s one of the greatest actors ever,’ she tells me, adding that his calling her ‘a remarkable performer’ has left her ‘still in the clouds, like woo-woo, and the rainbows’. Encounters with Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn (whose name in Cotillard’s cadence resembles nothing so much as ‘champagne’) elicit near-equal rapture. The awe on her face at the mention of Penn tells the story, and of Jolie she exclaims: ‘There’s an amazing positive energy that comes out of this woman. She has such a wonderful aura.’

Cotillard grew up in an artistic household; her parents – mother Niseema Theillaud and father Jean-Claude Cotillard – are both highly regarded stage actors in France. She and her twin younger brothers, Quentin and Guillaume, were encouraged to draw pictures on the walls of the family’s flat in Paris. Cotillard giggles at the memory. ‘We really enjoyed it,’ she says. ‘The living-room, all the corridors – we painted them and drew on them with crayons. We even made glue with toothpaste [and stuck artwork on the walls with it]. It was a big mess!’

Despite the chaotic warmth of her family life, Cotillard showed signs of having a tortured artistic temperament from as early as the age of nine. ‘I really started to ask myself, “What am I doing here? What are human beings doing here?” I so wanted to understand, and I didn’t. What I [wanted] in my mind was something like a perfect world, with a perfect understanding of everything.’ She laughs. ‘I thought that people were logical about life and respect and love. And when I started realising it was not that way at all, I felt that I didn’t want to live.’ Did she contemplate suicide? ‘Oh, no, I deeply love life, but I started searching quite early.’ Loneliness resulted, and performing became her salvation. ‘[When] I started to act I realised it was my way of sharing things with people,’ she has said, ‘of talking to them.’

Cotillard made her first film appearance aged five – it was a production by one of her parents’ friends – but took up acting seriously at 18. By her early twenties she was already famous in France because of her part in the blockbuster Taxi films, produced by Luc Besson. It was not the sort of fame she wanted, however. The films were slickly commercial. ‘They were a huge hit,’ she says, ‘but you have to prove something [after appearing in a film like that].’ Cotillard went on to garner roles in several well-received lower-budget pictures, including the S&M fairytale Love Me If You Dare (2004), which features her and Guillaume Canet as schoolmates turned electrically-attracted-to-each-other young adults whose relationship consists of an escalating game of truth or dare (the scene in which they die as liquid cement pours down on them is worth the admission fee alone), and Pretty Things (2001), for which she was nominated for a César. She still felt unappreciated: of the former film she says, ‘It was a success, but I think the business didn’t notice exactly what we did.’

In 2003 Cotillard appeared in her first Hollywood movie, Tim Burton’s Big Fish. I ask what it was like working with Burton, and she recalls him being even more excited than she was on their first day on set. ‘He was jumping everywhere like a squirrel and he told us, “Yesterday night I was in my bed and I was like, I want it to start! I want it to start!”‘ The following year she appeared as a brokenhearted man-eater in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement; her character kills one bound and blindfolded lover by shooting the mirror above his head, so that shards of glass fall like daggers into his naked flesh. In just eight minutes on screen she managed to steal the film from under Audrey Tautou’s nose – and won a César for her efforts. ‘That changed the vision that the French business had of me,’ she says, now picking at a beetroot-and-walnut salad with her hands. ‘They started to look at me like, “Oh, maybe there’s something more than the actress of the very commercial movies.”‘ Finally she had achieved the perfect balance of being sought-after for populist films (in 2006 Ridley Scott cast her as Russell Crowe’s love interest in A Good Year) yet respected within art-house cinema.

The role of Piaf, however, was of another order entirely. A year before she read the script her agent mentioned that the director, Olivier Dahan, was going to do a film about Piaf and was considering her for the role. ‘But at that time it wasn’t written. You don’t know what can happen. So it was just information,’ she says. She also knew nothing of Piaf’s life, so didn’t realise what a gold mine the part would be. What happened when the script landed? ‘It’s not just that I loved it,’ she replies. ‘It was the most special and incredible thing I’ve ever read. Her life is so extreme. You have to go through so many emotions… and particularly the fact that Olivier wanted only one actress to play her from 19 to 47. That was the most beautiful thing for an actor.’

Cotillard met with Dahan – they have both described their rapport as instant and ‘natural’ – and he insisted on casting her, despite the fact that she was less bankable than the actresses his producers had in mind. When they balked, Dahan chose Cotillard over their money, and made the film with less time and a smaller budget. He bet well.

So how does it feel being so widely praised for her work? Cotillard admits that, since being showered with them, she has overcome a former difficulty in accepting compliments. ‘It’s because I’m very proud of the movie and we put so much passion into it,’ she says. Her eyes light up when talking of the professional doors that have opened since La Vie en Rose, which include a starring role in next year’s Nine, a remake of Federico Fellini’s 8½ that will also star Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Sophia Loren. She also plans next year to film a love story set in the African desert.

Cotillard is still trying to keep her feet on the ground. ‘My dream is to do movies. It’s not to have an award,’ she replies when asked about her Bafta and Oscar hopes. But even she can’t keep the glee hidden for long. ‘I’m enjoying it totally, because it’s great,’ she says with a smile. ‘Such an award would be a very, very big cherry on the cake.’

• ‘La Vie en Rose’ is out on DVD

from Vanity Fair / by S.T. VanAirsdale

Marion Cotillard couldn’t sleep. A virtual Oscar lock since last summer, when her unhinged turn as Edith Piaf in the musical biopic La Vie en Rose first dazzled American audiences, the wait for news of her Best Actress nomination came down to 90 agonizing minutes in the pre-dawn Los Angeles dark. Nothing feels like a sure thing at 4 a.m.

“I try always not to expect so much, so I would say that I was protecting myself,” Cotillard said this morning in an interview with VF.com. “For sure, a lot of people talked to me about this [back] in June. It’s been quite a long time. I’ve tried since then to just enjoy what was going on.”

Among those goings-on were critics’ awards, guild nominations, and her recent Best Actress win at the Golden Globes. Cotillard is gathered again with the usual 2007-season suspects in the Oscars’ Best Actress category. “I didn’t know Ellen Page before Juno, but I think she has something very special,” she said. “And Julie Christie and Laura Linney and Cate Blanchett. Cate Blanchett! I admire her so much. It’s just crazy. When I think about it, it’s just not real.”

So does she think the last six months prepared her for the sleepless Oscar grind to follow? “None of this is hard,” Cotillard said. “In this world there are people who live hard lives, and the month to come will not be hard at all. I really have things to enjoy. There’s no special preparation.” She paused, stifled a laugh. “Except I have to find a dress, of course.”

from FOX News / by Roger Friedman

What was Marion Cotillard doing when she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress Sunday night? She was lying on the ground in her Beverly Hills hotel room watching TV while her friends were sitting in chairs.

“We didn’t expect the Best Actress to come up so fast,” the adorable 32-year-old French actress told me after the show at a dinner thrown for her by Picturehouse at the Chateau Marmont.

“Suddenly they were all jumping up and down screaming and I was lying there watching them,” Cotillard said. “They looked like fireworks.”

Her face glowed at the memory.

Within 30 seconds she got a call from her brother — one in a pair of twins — who lives in San Francisco.

“He was very excited,” Cotillard said.

Her parents in Paris, however, do not know what the Golden Globes are.

“They know the Oscars,” she said. “But they are serious theater actors. My father won the Moliere Award a couple of years ago. If I said Golden Globes, they would say, that’s nice.”

Cotillard had a dress being made by Nina Ricci for the Globes show, but told the designer not to hurry once the Globes were cancelled. Now it will be used for the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Jan. 28.

Meanwhile, we wondered why the much older character actor Harry Dean Stanton was one of her dinner guests, as was Matt Dillon. Were American actors hitting on her like crazy these days?

“No,” she laughed, as she drank a glass of Champagne. “I am very lucky with my man right now.” Her boyfriend is French. Stanton is simply one of her idols. Dillon came as the guest of another guest. Later, Tim Robbins stopped by after rehearsing a theater workshop. He’s another new friend.

But then it was well past midnight, and Harry Dean Stanton was volunteering to play the piano in the hotel lobby. What else can we find out about Marion Cotillard before she wins the Oscar, and becomes the biggest French actress in America since Juliette Binoche?

“My nickname is Yonks,” she said gleefully. “It’s spelled Ionx,” she explained. “My best friend calls me that. Sometimes she says ‘Yo, Yonks.’”

from Newsweek / by David Ansen and Devin Gordon

At least we think there will be, which is why we collected these likely acting nominees for our 11th Oscar roundtable. They’re a lot of fun, and they’ve got lots to say. Best of all: they didn’t need writers.

Daniel Day-Lewis arrived a little late, but he did it in style. He was wearing a jaunty porkpie hat and a black-and-white Western shirt that looked like something swiped from Bob Dylan’s closet. The result was so un-Hollywood that George Clooney, this roundtable’s class clown, couldn’t stop ribbing his fellow best-actor hopeful. Question: “Daniel, do you remember your first professional job?” Clooney: “It was a Western, wasn’t it?” One of the delights of these annual gatherings is watching beautiful, talented, rich celebrities become just folks. James McAvoy, who stars in “Atonement,” spent the time waiting to go onstage at L.A.’s Hammer Museum talking about trying to steal some wineglasses from a recent Oscar event, only to be caught by the waiter. Just before they were announced onstage, Clooney turned to Angelina Jolie and said, “Let’s not go out!” She then pointed to two nonactors nearby and said, “Let’s send them instead.” Before long, everyone—newbies and ­supercelebs—bonded. Jolie and Marion Cotillard, the French star of “La Vie en Rose,” chatted about Provence. “Juno” star Ellen Page confessed that she just got her first apartment. It’s a converted brothel, and it’s haunted. “My stuff keeps vanishing,” she said. “Weird things, like makeup.” Advice to Ellen: if you do win an Oscar, hide it. An edited transcript:

NEWSWEEK: Was there a movie you saw when you were young that made you say, “This is what I’ve got to do with my life”? Daniel, I read that you mentioned seeing the movie “If… ,” about a rebellion at a British boarding school, with Malcolm McDowell.
Daniel Day-Lewis: Certainly that was a very important moment, but not just because of Malcolm in that film. It was partly because I was at a boarding school at the time, and if I could have got away with setting fire to the place, I would have done it. And he created a banner around which all the outcasts rallied, and so that film was a big influence.
Marion Cotillard: I love Greta Garbo, and I was fascinated by her as a child. One of the most incredible feelings I had was watching “Camille.”
James McAvoy: It sounds weird, but there’s a film called “The Goonies.” [Laughter] And I mean it with all my heart. As a young boy that film made me cry because it’s about how you still have your problems at 10 years old or 12 years old. When I was little, you didn’t get chased by pirates and you didn’t get chased by gangsters and nobody was trying to kill you with guns, but your adventures were no less exciting. It helped inspire my imagination.
Ellen Page: It wasn’t until I was about 15, when I shot a film with this Canadian actress named Molly Parker, who I just absolutely adored and looked up to, and became inspired by. For the first time, I felt something different. I felt myself being overcome by something I can’t necessarily explain. But I wanted to keep feeling that and finding out what that was and learning more about it.

You worked with Molly Parker, didn’t you, in “Marion Bridge”? [Pause] You look startled.
Page: Oh, you know, it’s a Canadian independent film. They don’t always get seen.

Angelina?
Angelina Jolie: Because I had acting in my family, I didn’t like the movies very much, and I didn’t watch them that much. I remember “Streetcar” and I remember Brando, but I don’t know if that was as a woman or as somebody who liked acting.
Do you remember the first time you were paid to act? Daniel, you’re nodding.
George Clooney: It was a Western, wasn’t it?
Day-Lewis: George, I think you should answer this question.
Clooney: The first job I was paid for was “Batman & Robin.”

That’s the first job you were paid a lot for.
Clooney: You couldn’t get a job without getting into the Screen Actors Guild, so everybody I knew, including myself, would make up these credits just to get in. They didn’t have the Internet at the time, so you could get away with anything. I remember lying to a casting director, Barbara Claman, about this movie called “Cat People.” She was, like, “You were in that, were you?” I was, like, yep. And she goes, “Because I cast that.” I finally just said, “I can’t get in SAG. Help me out.” She helped me get a job on a film then called “The Predator.” We shot it in Hungary. It was Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern and I, all three of our first jobs. As big as they became later, the movie never came out, that’s how bad a film it was. But I got my SAG card.
Page: I would like to see that.
Clooney: I would, too. The guy—and I’m not kidding—the guy who financed it went to jail.
McAvoy: Because he made the film.
Clooney: Yes, as a matter of fact. If you’d seen me in it, you would understand why.

Daniel, were you paid for that little thing that you did in “Sunday Bloody Sunday”?
Day-Lewis: Yeah. I was 12 at the time, and there was a local grocer in southeast London who was, like, the unofficial mayor of that parish, and so the casting agent wisely asked her to round up all the local hooligans, of which I was one. She asked us initially to play soccer in the park as a background shot, and we were going to get £2 a day for that. I thought they must be insane. Because that’s what we were doing all the time anyhow. It was my first professional soccer match, in fact. Then the next day [director] John Schlesinger asked to see the nastier types amongst us, and he chose three of us to walk out of the local church and scratch a row of fancy cars with a broken milk bottle. I got £3 for doing that.

You were all quite young when you started. Angelina, didn’t you study at the Lee Strasberg center when you were 13?
Jolie: Yeah. Method is a very strange thing to study at 13. It’s all about recalling things from seven years ago. [Laughter]
Day-Lewis: You were asking about films that might have set us off on that path. I’m not sure if it’s the same for you, James, but certainly when I was coming up as a kid there was absolutely no expectation whatsoever of working in movies. They still don’t make very many films in Britain, and so all our expectations were focused on the theater. You know, film was kind of a secret hope that you didn’t talk about too much, because it was considered to be an inferior form by people where I come from. Theater was the thing.
Clooney: There is this weird pecking order, you know. Theater actors look down on the film actors, who look down on the television actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn’t have anybody to look down on.
McAvoy: What is really interesting about coming to L.A. is that there is an expectation to make it into films, television or whatever. Whereas as a child it was never even a consideration for me. But certainly in L.A. it is different because it’s everywhere. But even at home in Scotland I think there’s kids going, “I want to be a famous actor.”
Day-Lewis: Actors were weirdos when I was growing up.
Clooney: They’re fine now. [Laughter]
Day-Lewis: It was like flying the freak flag. You know, that was where the pride was—that you were a pariah of some kind.
McAvoy: I don’t know if you ever had a similar thing, but to see someone on television or in a film who was from your hometown was really embarrassing. You couldn’t watch it. Because that guy who’s speaking with such a strange accent—that’s your accent. Scottish television was full of English things and American things, so every now and again when you got the odd Scottish program, you were, like, that’s terrible.

I might be misattributing this quotation, but I think Matt Damon said at one point that you stop emotionally maturing at the age you get famous.
Clooney: Matt did; you’re right.

Is there any truth to that?
Clooney: Well, if you do, that would be your own fault.
Jolie: Yeah, but I think your daily life experience does change and therefore there are certain things that you don’t do. My favorite thing used to be to just sit in the subway and watch people; just walking by myself everywhere and living among people and watching them and talking to strangers. And I lost that. It was the hardest thing to lose. And I think that does affect you. You learn quickly how to get to know people, how to build maybe a smaller, more intimate world so that you can grow and learn from people and still be the same. But it is different.
Cotillard: The light on the American actors is very bright, and in France it’s kind of different. But each time I go back home, it’s so weird that I don’t have the same life anymore. People are staring and looking at me, and I can’t look at people as I was able to do it before.
Day-Lewis: Ellen, how are you finding it?
Page: It’s kind of intense right now. And a little surreal. Just sitting at this table is a little surreal. I’ve been so absorbed in it that I don’t really have the outside perspective right now. Daniel, the other night at the Critics’ Choice Awards, you said that it gets to a point sometimes when you start being unable to recognize yourself. And now I have those moments, or even just moments within the moments, of being like, what? But it is what it is. You know, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

James, I loved the story you told backstage about your experience with the paparazzi.
McAvoy: I’ve only ever had anybody waiting outside my house once. We got in our car and we were followed, and it was very weird and disconcerting. We thought we would just go about our daily life and just ignore it, all that kind of thing. I think because we had once read that Clive Owen said just ignore it. Like, do whatever Clive Owen does—he’s a solid guy. We were going into town to buy something for the house, and we went into a parking lot that costs £10 an hour, and on seeing the price of the parking, the paparazzi went, “F— that.” They left us alone. So the lesson is, if you’re being chased by paparazzi, don’t drive fast. Just find a really expensive parking lot, and you will be fine.
Clooney: I just found out about 10 days ago that I must live 300 or 400 yards from Britney Spears. I found out because I came home at 10 at night and there’s all these helicopters over my house with these spotlights on. I have a guesthouse where my assistant sometimes stays, and I thought someone had broken out of prison. Like something out of “Die Hard.” I get my baseball bat, which is what you always do in every film—I actually think Clive Owen said, “Get a baseball bat”—and I called up my assistant, who I thought was in the guesthouse, and I said, “Are you OK?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Look, if there’s someone in the house with you and you can’t talk, say the word ‘Stonehenge’.” And she’s like, “What the f— are you talking about? I’m in my apartment.” I go, “You’re not in the guesthouse?” “No.” So I’m, like, “Well, then, what the f— is going on?” And I go out and I’m running around with a baseball bat in my robe. And it turns out it’s paparazzi over at Britney Spears’s house. So now I have to move. [Laughter]

Angelina, do you travel with a baseball bat?
McAvoy: And Clive Owen?
Jolie: No.

Angelina, you’ve hit upon a strategy of dragging the press with you somewhere important, like Africa. Like, “If they’re going to follow me, I might as well go where I want people to see what’s happening.”
Clooney: She’s been really good about it. [To Jolie] When you guys showed up in Pakistan after the earthquake, at a point when our government, had they taken that moment to step in, could have actually made a huge difference in the area, you and Brad were the only people that were really showing up there. I remember specifically watching and thinking, “That is such a great use of people following you with a camera.” They have done it a bunch of times.
Jolie: They [the Pakistani media] didn’t know we were there at first. We turned on the TV when we got back home and there was a picture of us unloading our gear. It said, “Aid workers have arrived.” [Laughter]

This is obviously a big year in America for politics. George, in 2004, Kerry asked you to help him and you said, “I’m not going to help you. I can only hurt you.” Why do you think that?
Clooney: You know, Michael Moore—and I like Michael a lot—but that speech he gave at the Oscars was polarizing. It became Hollywood versus the heartland, and I always find that it’s best not to raise the rhetoric at that point. I’ve been a big supporter of Barack Obama since his Senate run and I’m a friend of his, but I said to him, “I stay completely out of it.” I don’t show up at those things. And believe me, it’s not because his group doesn’t say, “Come on, help us out.” It’s just not the attention you want. I worry about that a lot, because you don’t want to do harm.

Can you guys talk a little bit about the trust required of the director in order to get you to do a movie and why that’s so critical? Daniel, how did you know you could trust Paul Thomas Anderson? You had never worked with him.
Day-Lewis: Well, I suppose because I have had this very strange sense that, even though we came from very different cultures and were separated by a vast ocean and a continent and quite a number of years in age, we have been separated at birth. So I suppose I trusted him in the way you might trust a brother. You might kill each other, but you’d fight to the death for everything else.

Where did that sense come from?
Day-Lewis: I have no idea. I felt I knew something of him from his work. That’s a rash thing to think, perhaps, but I was certainly intrigued by him. When I met him, it was love at first sight.

Angelina, how did you get comfortable with Michael Winterbottom? I mean, the level of trust you must have had in your director to do a movie like “A Mighty Heart,” with so much emotion in it, must’ve been very high.
Jolie: I was comfortable when Mariane [Pearl] was comfortable. But I wasn’t so comfortable the first day of shooting, when I realized his style was so unbelievably raw. There is often no rehearsal, no one saying “cut.” For example, you have three different rooms, and we would go into one room and we’d be talking, say our five lines, and he’d film us. Then I’d go pee, and I’d come out, and the camera was still on. So I’d think, “OK …” Then I’d say my five lines again, and that would turn into 10 more minutes of talking, and then someone would go get something from the kitchen and I’d go to my bedroom, and he’d follow me and he just wouldn’t leave. It was really odd. But it became just the most perfect way to shoot that film. It was chaos in that moment. It was very intimate, and my big fear was that something horrible might happen and the camera would be like this. [She gestures as though there's a camera right in her face] But everybody was absolutely connected in every single moment. Even when we’d have lunch, we’d have it together at the table, or we’d all go for a walk together. We were just always present in the film. And so as an actor it brought me back to loving acting, and that was just great. But he does cross a line. One day one of the girls got sick and threw up, and he said, “Next time, tell us.” So he can be a little crazy. But I absolutely adore him.

Ellen, what was the atmosphere like working on “Juno”? It’s a very stylized piece, so I suspect there wasn’t a lot of improvisation.
Page: No, there wasn’t. I mean, Diablo Cody wrote one of the best screenplays I’ve ever read. It just didn’t need it. There was a lot of freedom in the sense that it was one of the most wonderful, open, collaborative atmospheres I ever have been involved with, which was just such a joy. Especially because I did trust everyone.
Day-Lewis: There’s one thing I wanted to ask you, Ellen. The wit, the very particular wit of “Juno”—it’s hard to imagine that that isn’t close to your own wit. But maybe that’s just part of the wonder of the work that you did in it. Did you feel when you were reading it and when you were doing it that there was a real kinship between your own sense of humor and the sense of humor of that character?
Page: I think it was even more than that—it reminded me of an aspect of what a lot of young women are like that absolutely never gets reflected in popular media. And so when I first read the screenplay I was just so in love that this was going to go out into the world. It really felt like a teenage female lead that had never existed before.

Marion, the amazing thing about your ­getting cast to play Edith Piaf was that the director didn’t even audition you.
Cotillard: I heard about the project before it was written. And I didn’t know Olivier Dahan, the director. But he said he thought about me, and I don’t know exactly why. Talking about trust, when I met him, we never talked about the script, we never talked about the character. We just talked about Piaf.

Is it hard, when you get so deeply into the part, to leave it behind once you’re done? How do you shake it off?
Cotillard: Before “La Vie en Rose,” I thought that it was just a job and when it’s finished you go back to your life. And I ­realized that it was not true when I finished playing her. First of all, I had that awful face. I had no eyebrows anymore. No hair. And when it grows back you really look like s–t. But when you carry someone around with you, and really have a relationship with that new person inside you-you give that person the emotions, and that character also gives the ­emotions—I think that sometimes it can be hard to just go back to your life.

Does Piaf still pop up in your behavior every now and then?
Cotillard: No, hopefully finis. But it really took a while. Everywhere I went just after we finished the movie I saw part of her. Like, I remember going to the … shrink? Right, shrink?
Clooney: Yes, shrink. [Laughter]
Cotillard: I went to a shrink right after the movie, and I saw Piaf everywhere. I arrived and the street was Marcel Cerdan Street, who was her lover. And there was this huge statue of Cerdan, and I was, like, “No way!” I’m quite a normal person, but it was getting weirder and weirder. I didn’t go to the shrink because I couldn’t get rid of Piaf, but in a way I kind of was.
McAvoy: Can I ask all of you, do you ever consider the effect on an audience of the decisions that you make as an actor? Or do you just consider truth?
Day-Lewis: As you’re working, James, or in the decision to do the job in the first place?
McAvoy: In the decisions that you make on set as a character. Decisions about how to play the character.
Day-Lewis: When I’m working, it doesn’t really occur to me that anyone is ever going to see the thing. It’s a perversity, I suppose, but that appeals to me a lot. It kinds of harks back to the days when I felt like a bit of an outcast for doing the work that I did.
Clooney: But before you get to the set, do you have discussions about the character, in terms of how he will be perceived by the audience?
McAvoy: Yeah, my question was just, literally, “If I do this, will this have the effect on the audience that we want it to have at this point in the story?”
Clooney: You never can.
Day-Lewis: I think if I started a thing like that, I would crash the car.

Is it different for you, James?
McAvoy: It is different for me, yes. I’m fascinated by the way you work, Daniel, and I have worked with Forest Whitaker in “The Last King of Scotland”—he gave an exceptional performance, completely doing it that way. And I’ve never done it that way. I think I’m too scared to, and that’s partly a controlling aspect with my personality, I suppose. But it is a way of working that I really admire, and I don’t know if I have it in me.

Did you rehearse at all for “Atonement”?
McAvoy: Yeah, for three weeks, which is kind of unusual. I usually dread rehearsal for film because I’ve found that film people will never know what to do except sit in a room together and make you say your lines 5,000 times. But [director] Joe [Wright] galvanizes everyone. He literally gives direction.

Daniel, do you ever rehearse?
Day-Lewis: I prefer not to.
Clooney: They’ll do stuff like put tape on the floor and go, “OK, now you’re walking in and three vampires are going to come out over here.” And you’re pretending that there’s vampires across from you and everybody is laughing at you. I don’t find it helpful in any way.
McAvoy: It was great. It was such an amazing experience. I’ve never had it in film.
Clooney: I’ve never seen it. I think it’s fantastic. I’m not putting it down at all.
McAvoy: Do you want to fight me? [Laughter]
Clooney: I do.
McAvoy: Let’s do this.
Clooney: Unplug your microphone first. [More laughter]
Day-Lewis: It is so important to work the way you need to work, and you have probably found a way that works for you. Angelina, what you had to do in “A Mighty Heart” is a very, very particular thing—to have that responsibility of trying to play the part of a woman who you obviously got to know very well during that time. What was your experience of leaving that film?
Jolie: I was thinking about that when you were talking about letting go of a character. I looked face to face at the person I had been playing. And I continue to see her. Our kids still play together. So it was very odd. But she’s just the most wonderful woman, and there was some kind of kinship that I felt with her. I really truly love her, and I can say that because I do know her. That actually made me terribly nervous. It was the first film where I didn’t sleep the night before we started shooting. That night, she and her son came by to say hello to everybody, to say good luck before they left. Adam talked about his dad, and I realized that when this little boy grows up, this whole film—whatever the critics say, whatever anybody says—is going to be his re-enactment of how much his parents loved each other and how upset his mother was when this happened. So as an actor it certainly filled me with as many tools and emotions as I needed, because it was so real. But as her friend I was very, very scared. I was very relieved when she felt we had done it right.

Was Mariane on the set during the shoot?
Jolie: No, she never came on the set. She was going to come the first day, and she walked in on me in a costume fitting for her wedding dress. I think she just realized in that moment that she could not see any of it. She said it looked absolutely exact, and then we had dinner, and then she said she was going to leave the next morning.

When I watch “A Mighty Heart,” I think it’s a very political movie, but not overtly-its politics are in those scenes around the dinner table, where there’s all these different people from different cultures working together. There’s a kind of commentary in that. Did you discuss that when you were working on the movie?
Jolie: Yeah, we were very conscious of it. It’s something that Mariane made a big point of in her book, and it’s very much who she is, and what that family represents today. They all continue to work ­toward dialogue. Just having all those actors at the table was a nice balance, because during this time when our country is at war and there’s so much happening, to be in India and Pakistan with Indian and Pakistani actors, who usually also don’t work together and don’t cross each other’s border, to have them asking us questions about politics, to actually have open discussions about 9/11, about Muslim culture, American culture, sharing food, sharing ideas, writing each other’s kids’ names down—that did something for us. It was really exciting to say, “God, that Pakistani actor or that Indian actor is one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with,” and I don’t often think of actors beyond, you know, the list we’re all used to. I think that is very symbolic of what the piece represented.

Daniel, there’s a lot of politics in “There Will Be Blood.” Do you think about those things?
Day-Lewis: No, not at all. I just figured it would take care of itself.
Jolie: Your process is just amazing. You are just so brilliant. We all look to you as this mad genius, like, “He must have the most difficult time because of the work that comes out of him.”
Clooney: OK, let’s get it out right now. All actors bow to this f—er right here. And it makes us crazy when he goes, “Yeah, and then I went and I was a cobbler for a year.” He made shoes for a year! You’re amazing, and you just kill it for the rest of us. [The audience applauds]
Day-Lewis: Thank you, George.
Clooney: Yeah. Whatever. [Laughter]

Speaking of shoes—
Clooney: Wow, that’s a segue.

Actually, it came up when we were doing this roundtable with Annette Bening and Kate Winslet. They were talking about how they physically create a character, and how important clothing is. Bening said that for her it begins with the shoes—that once she gets how the character walks, she gets the character. And Winslet said that it was her bra. I think she was serious. Is there some physical aspect that helps you find characters?
Page: I really have to say, I think the most commonly asked question—and the most annoying question—is, how do you relate? How do you relate to Juno? How are you like Juno? If you’re playing someone who is honest and whole and well written, you are going to be able to relate to that individual, because we are just all made up with the same stuff.
McAvoy: But Ellen, can I ask, how do you relate to Juno? [Laughter]
Clooney: She gets a new bra.
McAvoy: I had an experience when I did “Narnia”—I read that book a lot when I was a kid, and I imagined that character from the ages of, like, 8 to 24. So when I was given the script, I already knew how I was going to play him, because I imagined him so much. And it taught me that when I got a new script, clothes and all that stuff are important, but I try to imagine the character like he’s been in your head for 12 years. It’s about finding the character in your head first, and then recognizing him in the right clothes.

That character didn’t wear shoes.
McAvoy: Or a bra.

I have a technical question, Marion: when you were playing Piaf, you had to spend several hours a day getting your makeup done. How long was it?
Cotillard: Depending on the day, it was from three to five hours.

I always wondered, what do you do during those three to five hours?
Cotillard: I slept all the time.

Really?
Cotillard: Yes, we had almost 30 days of heavy makeup. I wanted to kill everybody, and especially everybody wanted to kill me. So they put me in a bed, and they did the makeup while I was sleeping. It was very funny because there’s a guy who came to shoot video of me almost every day getting this done. And I saw the video, and they were doing things to me and I can’t believe I didn’t wake up. It was acrylic painting and latex and prosthetics, so there’s glue and all that. Sometimes I had nightmares, and I would wake up with a big scream and cry. One day I was crying while I was sleeping, so the makeup artist’s assistant had to spend four hours with tissues around my eyes, so the salt from my tears didn’t spoil the makeup.

Were there ever roles that any of you ­regretted taking?
Jolie: That’s part of it. You’ve got to have your bad ones.
Clooney: People will give you s–t later and say, “Why did you do this movie?” Because I needed a gig. Sometimes you just needed the job.

All the actors I’ve ever talked to always say they’re afraid that every job they are ­offered is going to be their last.
Clooney: I still have that in me. You are always still auditioning in your head. If you don’t think that way, then I think you are lost.
McAvoy: In your head, do you make yourself take off your clothes?
Clooney: Just now I did.
McAvoy: Excellent. And did you get the part?
Clooney: Hang on, wait, I’m still working on it. No, I did not. Clive Owen got it.

Ellen, because of the success of “Juno,” are you now suddenly getting a lot of offers?
Page: More than I was a little while ago. Which is absolutely wonderful. Obviously that’s the huge gift of a film like this doing so well. For an actor at any age, that’s huge. But I am going to take my time.

There’s a flip side, of course. Can some of you talk about moments where you failed?
McAvoy: I was once told that I’d never work in Scotland again. And it was on my third job.
Clooney: Really?
McAvoy: Yeah. And that’s the end of that. I’m not going any further.
Clooney: I did a series called “Baby Talk.” It’s a little baby that has to talk—it was the “Look Who’s Talking” sitcom. I have a whole list of really s–tty shows that I was really s–tty in. I’m really proud of them. I had a mullet in this one. I have a whole career with a mullet, actually. But this was a sitcom with a guy who was a very big, powerful producer. One of the first things he did was he fired the baby, which I thought was a little strange. And then the lead actress was fired. And then he started on me, and it was the worst experience of my life, because I had never been in that position, where you can’t defend yourself. I remember—it was a very specific moment; it changed my career, actually—going home and I called up my agent and I said, “How bad does it get if I just say ‘f— you’ to this guy?” And my agent goes, “It gets bad.” And I said, “OK,” and I walked in and the producer went after me and I said, “F— you.” And I got fired and sued by the network, though they eventually dropped all of that. It was a terrifying time, but it absolutely freed me up to the idea that the worst thing that could happen is-what? You take away my sitcom? It freed me up to decide that I was going to try to do better projects and not worry so much about succeeding. It changed everything for me.
McAvoy: Was the main problem between you and your mullet? [Laughter]
Clooney: Yes, it was.

Speaking of acting with kids, Daniel, was your acting process any different on “There Will Be Blood,” because you had a lot of scenes to play with a 10-year-old who had never acted before?
Day-Lewis: No difference, but it certainly would very much depend upon the 10-year-old. And this was just a remarkable young person. He was just a great companion. He was my partner. I miss him a lot, actually. His mom was a state trooper, and his dad was a cowboy. They didn’t know anything about the movies. There was a moment which could have gone awry at the very beginning, when his mom quite rightly thought, “What kinds of people are going to be involved with my son?” She wanted to see what I was going to be like, because she knew he would be spending a lot of time with me. So she rented a copy of “Gangs of New York.” [Laughter] And there was a flurry of phone calls. And the studio dispatched a copy of “The Age of Innocence” very quickly.

You also were in a very strange position, because you had to reshoot a lot of scenes that you had done because Paul Dano replaced the original actor playing Eli Sunday. Was it hard to gear yourself up to do all that again—redo about three weeks of work? Or did you see it as an opportunity?
Day-Lewis: Quite honestly, I can’t imagine doing that with anyone else except Paul Dano. I really can’t. He made that possible. Often when you’re making a film, even on a good day, you feel like you’re wading in quicksand. And to take a big step back like that—it felt like a pivotal moment, but Paul made it possible.

How did the director tell you that this was going to have to happen?
Day-Lewis: We talked about it for a while beforehand. It wasn’t something that happened just overnight. It was something we tried to avoid at all costs. I hope I’m never again in a situation where a young actor is replaced, because you understand how devastating that can be to somebody. I found that the hardest thing to deal with, really.

Have any of you been fired?
McAvoy: No, but I’ve been on a job where an actor was replaced. It wasn’t a young actor, either. He must have been 40, and it was devastating. Absolutely devastating. I mean, it’s ridiculous. He was told every day that what he was doing was “iconic.” That was the phrase. “What you’re doing is iconic. Brilliant, it’s genius, iconic.” And then he’s sacked in three weeks.
Day-Lewis: So if anyone says “iconic” to you, just punch them straightaway.

George, didn’t you once have an experience like that in television, where someone was telling you that what you were doing was brilliant and then the next week they hired an acting coach for you?
Clooney: Yeah. I was doing a pilot. It was a Western sitcom in a whorehouse. It seemed like a good idea to me. [Laughter] I came in and they kept saying, “It’s great, it’s great. You’re the next big thing, you’re the funniest thing we’ve ever seen. You’re great.” And then literally four days later, nothing was working. The script had problems, I was probably terrible in it. [Writer] Barbara Corday and a couple of other people came in and said, “We want to bring in an acting teacher for you.” It was like, wait, so I’m not lightning in a bottle anymore? It’s over? It was humiliating. TV can be really brutal, because it’s so quick. You’ll do a pilot and there’s so many subtle ways to fire you if the show gets picked up. You’ll get the first call—”The show got picked up for 13 episodes!” And you’re like, “Yay!” But you’re not picked up yet. Your agent says, “OK, they have four days to call and activate your contract.” So now you’re going, “Uh, yay?” And then you wait and you wait and you wait and then they call and say, “Listen, they’re going to replace your part. But it’s not because of you—you’re lightning in a bottle.”
McAvoy: “And keep the mullet. It looks great.”

George, is it true that you are getting involved in the writers’ strike?
Clooney: That just happened the night we were at the awards show. It’s actually Harvey Weinstein getting me involved.

He can do that.
Clooney: Yes, he can. I was at the Critics’ Choice Awards and I said, “Let’s get everybody in a room and stay there until we solve it.” Which I really do think is a good idea. I talked to Spielberg and a few people—the CEOs and the writers that can help facilitate that. I am happy to be a part, but I wasn’t standing out there going, you know, “You’re going to do it and you’re going to like it.”

In the old days, when it was just the studios and they weren’t part of these conglomerates, it was easier to get these things solved.
Clooney: Yeah, Lou Wasserman and Jack Warner would go in and sit down and say, “OK, now how are we going to solve this?” But who are you getting in the room now? Multinational corporations?
McAvoy: It’s interesting how this is all so financially important for the industry, but it is also a celebration of peers, and that’s a shame that can’t seem to happen.

So what happens if the Oscars come around and there’s still no resolution to the strike?
McAvoy: The world will end. It’s fact. It’s official. I was told so. [Laughter]
Clooney: Nobody is going to cross a picket line. Nobody would even consider it. Would you want to be the only person at the awards?
Jolie: We’re all going to George’s house.