Profile: Marion Cotillard

BY: Howard Karren

When director Olivier Dahan cast Marion Cotillard as the legendary chanteuse Édith Piaf in his epic biopic La Vie en Rose (2007), she was not yet a bankable star. She had played in many French movies, having acted since she was a child—her parents and siblings are all actors and directors—won a César Award (for A Very Long Engagement) and had even done some American films (Big Fish; A Good Year), but no matter: the Piaf film’s financiers insisted on lowering Dahan’s budget as long as Cotillard was his choice for the role. Their doubts were unfounded—Cotillard was transcendent. As a singer, she understood Piaf’s gift, and though Cotillard was far more beautiful and glamorous than the iconic Parisian street urchin, she embodied the tortured spirit of Piaf with sublime authenticity. “I’ve always felt an outcast,” Cotillard told The Guardian. “There is something strange about me. I don’t ever feel at ease in a group of people. I have to fight hard to overcome my fears.” The film was an art-house hit in the U.S., and Cotillard earned an Academy Award for Best Actress in the role, the first time ever (and since) that a French-language performance has been honored.

We have been blessed with many great onscreen performances from Cotillard since. She portrayed Owen Wilson’s magical muse in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Leonardo DiCaprio’s dimensionally trapped mate in Inception. In the movie musical Nine, as Daniel Day-Lewis’s long-suffering wife, she defiantly sings “Take It All” to him (see the video at top). Cotillard was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar once again in the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night, another French-language film, and got raves as a wheelchair-bound killer-whale trainer in Rust and Bone. She was heartbreaking as a desperate Ellis Island arrival in James Gray’s The Immigrant, her first leading role in an American film.

All this on top of being an environmental activist—she works tirelessly for Greenpeace—and modeling as the face of Lady Dior. Recently, Cotillard had a son with her longtime boyfriend, French heartthrob Guillaume Canet. And still, at 40, she’s been acting up a storm. She will star in the World War II romance Allied, in which she and Brad Pitt play intelligence operatives; it opens in theaters November 23. She has a supporting role in Assassin’s Creed, an action movie starring Michael Fassbender (opening December 21), and in It’s Only the End of the World, the controversial family melodrama from director Xavier Dolan that was booed at Cannes when it won the Grand Prix and hasn’t yet found an American distributor. She recently shot a film, Rock’n Roll, that Canet directed and costars with her, a fictional story in which they play themselves as characters. It sounds intimidating, but Cotillard is content with her life. “I’m living my dream, and I still dream about this dream, and I still have a lot of dreams within this dream,” she told The New York Times. “And my evolution as a human being, and the people I meet, and the connection I have with myself and others, is getting stronger and stronger.”