Isabelle Huppert
No ordinary diva

The French actor has built her screen, and stage, career around the sheer the power of unpredictability, writes Saibal Chatterjee

WIDELY regarded as one of the most consummate actresses of her generation, 50-year-old Isabelle Huppert combines her plain Jane looks with her smouldering sensuality with deadly effect. She seems to be able to burn up a corner of the screen each time she walks across it. Intense, spirited and always ready to push herself into unknown terrain, she is at once an actress of uncommon substance and a sizzling object of desire.

Graduating from the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique, Paris, Huppert forayed into theatre (she still continues to be involved with the stage) with productions like Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country and Euripides’ Medea. She made her screen debut in 1971 at age 16. In 35 years and 70-odd films, she has carved a niche entirely her own.

Huppert is one of only two actresses—Helen Mirren is the other—to win the Best Actress prize in Cannes twice—first for her role as a young woman who murders her parents in Claude Chabrol’s dark Violette Noziere (1978), then for her stunning interpretation of a sexually repressed piano teacher in Michael Haneke’s Le Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001). In the same year as Violette Noziere, she bagged a BAFTA award for her luminous performance in Claude Goretta’s Lacemaker.

Huppert’s intelligence as an actress is best reflected in her choice of roles and directors. She has worked not only with an array of top French directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol (with whom she has a long-standing and brilliantly productive creative partnership), Maurice Pialat and Bertrand Tavernier, but also with some of Europe’s most admired filmmakers—the likes of Andrzej Wajda, Marta Meszaros and, of course, Michael Haneke.

The sheer range of Huppert’s on-screen work is nothing short of astounding. From ing`E9nue to victim of fate to femme fatale, she has played every character type with rare skill and sympathy. From the sombre to the droll, she has hit every emotional note without ever letting the effort show, without ever letting the passion flag. That is what makes Huppert what she is—a natural born performer.

In the 1970s, Huppert gave Hollywood a fair shot. In her first American film—Rosebud (1975), helmed by independent director Otto Preminger, she played one of five young women abducted by West Asian terrorists. Even in a crowd, it was easy to notice her exceptional histrionic abilities.

She could not, however, rescue Michael Cimino’s disastrous Heaven’s Gate (1981). The debacle of that film curtailed Huppert’s Hollywood career. She has been seen only sporadically in US-made films, for example in Hal Hartley’s The Amateur, about a nun who becomes a writer of pornographic fiction.

The early 1980s career downswing, mercifully, did not last long. Huppert bounced back with films of the quality of Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon (Tavernier gave the actress one of her first big hits in 1974, Les Valseuses, a film that also saw the emergence of French superstar Gerard Depardieu), Godard’s Passion and Diane Kury’s unforgettable Entre Nous, all in the span of three heady years.

In the 1980s she was also in Maurice Pialat’s Loulou, which had her in the role of an upper class woman physically attracted to a loutish vagabond, Chabrol’s Une Affaire de Femmes, where she played the character of a middle-class woman sentenced to death for illegally carrying out abortions, and Australian director Paul Cox’s Cactus, an intriguing love story between a blind man who cultivates cacti and a one-eyed French `E9migr`E9 on the run from a dead-end marriage.

In 1988, Huppert featured in the cast of Polish master Wajda’s French-language adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, a film scripted by Jean-Claude Carriere.

The remarkable French actress has only got better with age, continuing to deliver wonderfully well-etched characters in more recent outings like Chabrol’s Madame Bovary and Le Ceremonie, Patricia Mazuy’s Saint-Cyr, Christian Vincent’s La Separation, Francois Ozon’s 8 Women and her latest release, Patrice Chereau’s Gabrielle, based on a Joseph Conrad story about a man and woman 10 years into a loveless marriage.

Huppert is no ordinary diva. The fictional characters she brings alive on screen are often disquietingly real. She plumbs the darker depths of human psyche with the fervour of a medieval sorceress blended with the inflections of a modern-day sensibility.

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