Marion Cotillard
Marion Cotillard (born September 30, 1975, Paris, France) is a French actress whose Academy Award-winning performance as Edith Piaf in La Môme (2007; also released as La Vie en rose) propelled her to international fame.
Cotillard grew up in Orléans, France, in an artistic household: her father, Jean-Claude Cotillard, was an actor and director, and her mother, Niseema Theillaud, was an actress. Her parents performed together in a theatre troupe, and Cotillard got her first taste of acting when she appeared onstage in a play written by her father. At the age of 16, she moved to Paris to pursue a professional acting career.
In her first prominent film role, in the Luc Besson-penned Taxi (1998), Cotillard played the girlfriend of a pizza delivery man turned vigilante taxi driver. The movie spawned two sequels over the next five years, and the Taxi franchise became one of France’s most successful. In 2005 she earned a César Award, France’s most-esteemed film award, for her performance as a vengeful prostitute in Un Long Dimanche de fiançailles (2004; A Very Long Engagement). While that film and the Taxi series cemented Cotillard’s star status in her own country, she became known to American audiences with her turn in American director Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), in which she had a small but memorable role. Her next foray into Hollywood was less successful: she appeared in the poorly received A Good Year (2006), which starred Russell Crowe.
In 2007 Cotillard garnered international attention for her portrayal of the legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf in La Môme. Cotillard, who stunningly captured the gauche grace of Piaf, was widely and effusively praised for her mercurial, often-tortured performance that captured the diminutive singer in a way rarely seen on-screen. She won numerous honours for her portrayal, including an Academy Award, a César, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe. She later starred in Public Enemies (2009) as the girlfriend of criminal mastermind John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp), who was responsible for robbing a string of American banks during the Great Depression. In 2009 Cotillard also appeared in Nine. The musical featured an all-star cast that included Daniel Day-Lewis, Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, and Kate Hudson.
After furthering her career with a role as a femme fatale in the brainy science fiction thriller Inception (2010), Cotillard returned to France to star in the ensemble dramedy Les Petits Mouchoirs (2010; Little White Lies); she also appeared in the sequel (2019). In 2011 she portrayed the mistress of Pablo Picasso in Woody Allen’s romantic fantasy Midnight in Paris, as well as a doctor tracking the spread of a deadly virus in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Contagion. Cotillard’s character in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was the love interest for the tortured superhero Batman. In the gritty romance De rouille et d’os (2012; Rust and Bone), she starred as an orca trainer struggling to recover from the loss of her legs in a gruesome occupational accident. Cotillard evoked the vicissitudes of a Polish woman recently arrived in 1920s America in The Immigrant (2013).
In the Dardenne brothers’ Deux jours, une nuit (2014; Two Days, One Night), she evoked the struggles of a young woman attempting to save her job by persuading her colleagues to forfeit their bonuses. Her moving performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Cotillard then portrayed the murderous wife of the title character in Macbeth (2015), a film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s classic play. Her 2016 credits included the romantic thriller Allied, in which she starred with Brad Pitt and portrayed a member of the French Resistance who might be a German spy, and the action adventure Assassin’s Creed, based on a video game.
In 2017 Cotillard starred in the romantic thriller Les Fantômes d’Ismaël (Ismael’s Ghosts) and in the comedy Rock’n Roll, playing herself; the latter featured her longtime boyfriend Guillaume Canet, who also directed the film. Gueule d’ange (2018; Angel Face) centres on an alcoholic mother and her young daughter. Cotillard later lent her voice to the family comedy Dolittle (2020). Her credits from 2021 included the unconventional musical Annette, in which she played an opera singer.
In addition to her film work, Cotillard used her high public profile to bring attention to the aims of Greenpeace, working for the environmental organization as a spokesperson. She also contributed to Dessins pour le climat (“Drawings for the Climate”), a book of drawings published by Greenpeace in 2005 to raise funds for the group.