Isabelle Adjani
Isabelle Adjani
Famous French Actress and Model
Isabelle Yasmine Adjani, (born June 27, 1955 in Paris’ 17th arrondissement) is a four-time César Award-winning and two-time Academy Award-nominated French film actress and singer. Isabelle Adjani is of Algerian-German parentage, and performs in her native French, English, and German.
Isabelle Adjani first gained fame as a classical actress for her interpretation of Agnès, the main female role in Molière’s L’École des femmes, but soon left the Comédie française Isabelle Adjani had joined in 1972 to pursue a movie career. After minor roles in several films, Isabelle Adjani received positive reviews and much public acclaim for her performance in the 1974 film La Gifle (or The Slap). The following year, Isabelle Adjani was cast in her first starring role in François Truffaut’s The Story of Adèle H. Critics enthused over her performance, with Pauline Kael calling her acting talents "Prodigious". All this attention resulted in a nomination for the Best Actress Oscar and offers for rôles in Hollywood films, such as Walter Hill’s 1978 crime thriller The Driver. Isabelle Adjani then played Lucy in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Nosferatu (1979) .
In 1981, Adjani received the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award for the Merchant Ivory film Quartet based on the novel by Jean Rhys, and for the horror film Possession. The following year, Isabelle Adjani received her first César Award for Possession, in which Isabelle Adjani portrays a frustrated woman going mad. In 1983, Isabelle Adjani won the César, for her depiction of a vengeful woman in the French blockbuster One Deadly Summer.
In 1989, Isabelle Adjani co-produced and starred in a biopic of the tragic French sculptor Camille Claudel. Isabelle Adjani received her third César and second Oscar nomination for her role in the film, which was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Following this publicity, Isabelle Adjani was chosen by People magazine as one of the ‘50 Most Beautiful People’ in the world. Her fourth César win was for the 1994 film Queen Margot, an ensemble epic directed by Patrice Chéreau.
