This reticence may be one reason Tautou has not pursued Hollywood further. When asked how her parents, a teacher and a social worker, have responded to her success, she is lost for words. She is gracefully evasive on such reasonable topics as the recent furore in France over film stars' wages. Her response to it is to reveal no opinion or feeling that doesn't pertain to her films. Tautou recently told the French newspaper Le Figaro that "celebrity makes me awkward". He's a very special director because he's a photographer, a drawer, he understands animation. Michel has such a personal way of telling a story. We travelled in clouds and in upside-down cars the decor transformed every day. "And it was a crazy experience walking on to the set to make it. "It's very difficult to describe this story because it's completely surreal," she says gaily. Tautou plays a woman who has a water lily growing inside her lung, Romain Duris the husband determined to save her. An adaptation of Boris Vian's cult novel Froth on the Daydream, it is directed by Michel Gondry, the prodigiously inventive music video and film director, most notably of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. But I never thought he wouldn't win."Īs it happens, her next film is about illness, but Mood Indigo will be an altogether lighter affair than Therese Desqueyroux. Of course, at some point we learned that he would die, so it was not a shock. "I went to see him a few times afterwards. "I remember once he came on to the set and I said, 'Wow, Claude, you're so elegant, why are you dressed like that?' And he said, 'This morning I had some medical examinations, so I wanted to impress the sickness.' "But he never complained, he was very discreet, he kept all his strength until the very end. "It was obvious during the shoot that he was ill because every morning he had to have radiotherapy," she recalls. Tautou was in Cannes a year ago, when Therese Desqueyroux had its premiere though sadly she was without Miller, one of France's leading directors, who died shortly after completing the film. It was a bit like keeping a lid on a volcano." "I think of the revolt inside her, the contradiction of hating this bourgeois life yet having to live it is so powerful that to hold it back she needs a very thick mask. ![]() Underplaying is not necessarily more difficult, but it's more radical. "Claude sketches intentions rather than showing them," says the actress, "trusting the spectator to pick up the signs. She's since been glamorous ( Priceless), comic ( Beautiful Lies) and briefly gone Hollywood ( The Da Vinci Code). Other, early roles included a stalker in He Loves Me He Loves Me Not, a Turkish asylum seeker in Dirty Pretty Things and the nagging girlfriend, a selfless straight role among a gaggle of Euro-dishes, in Pot Luck. In the 12 years since Amelie, Tautou has studiously avoided being typecast as an ingenue. That allure has given her time to develop as an actress. Perhaps this is how she has endeared herself, by representing the very essence of Frenchness. ![]() She was also the face of Chanel No 5 and portrayed Coco Chanel on screen. ![]() And yet there is something about that breakthrough character, the wide-eyed, gamine Amelie Poulain, amid one of the most seductive renditions of Paris in cinema, which captured her country's imagination and held it. Now 37, she's still most known for a single role, in the massive 2001 hit Amelie, her career since being respectable but not spectacular she famously shuns the limelight. Jeanne Moreau was the first, setting the bar high Audrey Tautou seemed a perfect fit. Unlike other festivals, which tend to employ pretty (and often vacant) TV presenters to helm their opening and awards ceremonies, Cannes characteristically aims higher, at film stars with a bit of class. Last month the Cannes film festival closed as it began, with one of the most famous faces in France acting as maitresse de ceremonie. An actress who captured the hearts of France with a film hit now famously shuns the limelight and tells Demetrios Matheou she has moved on to darker things
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