Audrey Tautou Biography

Audrey Tautou was born on the 9th of August, 1976, in the small town of Beaumont, on the southern edge of Clermont-Ferrand at the northern tip of the Central Massif. Some 300 miles south of Paris, this was a place of plains and mountains, a true rural economy trading on its own purity (the town of Volvic was very close by). Audrey's father was a dental surgeon hailing from the department of the Correze, some 70 miles to the south-west, much of his family residing in Brive-la-Gaillarde, Egletons and Marcillac-la-Croizelle (Tautou is a prevalent surname in La Correze). Her mother, meanwhile, a teacher working in the field of adult literacy, was more local, an Auvergne girl through and through.

The eldest of four children, with one brother and two sisters, Audrey would be raised in Montlucon, some 50 miles north-west of Beaumont. This was prime French countryside, catering for tourists seeking to ski, hike, fish, bike and climb. No wonder, then, that young Audrey would be something of a tomboy, a prepubescent daredevil, the joy of outdoor activities taking her mind from academic pursuits that, with her natural intelligence, she found easy to digest. Still she would drag behind in class, often being grouped with the very worst pupils. Like many kids, she concentrated only on what interested her, and what interested her for ages was monkeys, the young girl hoping one day to become a primatologist, like Dian Fossey. Outside of class, she would study piano for 6 years, as well as the oboe, eventually playing the latter instrument in an Auvergne youth orchestra.

There were no artists or creative types in Tautou's family, indeed her grandparents were pretty much peasants. Audrey's mother, though, would sow seeds in her daughter by taking her to the cinema two or three times a week. Come the age of 14, towards the end of her time at Montlucon's Jules Ferry college, she would begin to show an interest in the arts and in show business - not simply in acting, but in set and costume design, the whole theatrical caboodle. Moving on to the Lycee Madame-de-Stael, where she'd earn her baccalaureat, she'd begin to put on plays during drama classes.

It was thought that, given her prowess on the oboe, Tautou might be destined for a career in music. The girl herself, though, had little confidence in her ability and instead enrolled at a Paris university to study Literature. However, a life in theatre was still a possibility. Audrey had enjoyed drama classes so much that, as a reward for earning her bac, in the summer of 1995 her parents paid for her to attend a 15-day course at the renowned Florent theatre school. Established some 30 years before and linked to Paris's Theatre du Marais, the school had already produced such cinema heavyweights as Isabelle Adjani, Daniel Auteuil, Sophie Marceau, Anne Parillaud, Samuel Le Bihan and Edouard Baer.

On her arrival in Paris, Tautou was shocked at the beauty and stylishness of the women passing her flat and, feeling unable to compete, even considered returning to Montlucon. Once she'd realised, though, that she shared a block with the Elite Modelling Agency, she persisted with her course. Inevitably, she loved it and enrolled at Florent at the beginning of the next term, her parents being amenable as Audrey agreed to concentrate mostly on her university studies and to drop theatre if after a single year she had not made rapid progress. But she did make rapid progress. Massively enthused by such contemporary authors as Jean-Claude Grumberg, Xavier Durringer and Bernard-Marie Koltes, as well as the classics of Tennessee Williams, she'd quickly gain a grounding in modern theatre. She'd furthermore be immersed in French classicism, appearing in Marivaux's Le Denouement Imprevu, as Agnes in Moliere's L'Ecole Des Femmes and as Alarica in Aldiberti's Le Mal Court. And, as the Florent actively encouraged its students to audition for professional roles, she found herself work with near-unseemly speed. By the end of her first term she'd already joined Edouard Baer in the TV movie Coeur De Cible, part police comedy, part sharp satire on the inner workings of TV shows. Her onscreen debut would come when the film first appeared on French television on January 19th, 1996.

And the work kept coming. 1996 would also see her in a small role as a switchboard operator in Jean-Paul Salome's comedy La Verite Est Un Vilain Defaut, a TV movie starring Sam Karmann and Marie-France Pisier, once infamous for her performance in 1977's The Other Side Of Midnight. The April of 1997 would bring another brief part, this time in an episode of Les Cordiers, Juge Et Flic, where police superintendant Pierre Mondy was continually aided in solving tricky cases by his magistrate son and journalist daughter. A few months later, Audrey would complete her academic education by earning her DEUG (Diplome d'Etudes Universitaires), majoring in Modern Literature.

1998 would be a watershed year for Tautou, whose rise was now nothing short of meteoric. She began by appearing alongside Eric Savin in the short La Vieille Barriere, which explored the lives, dreams and opportunities of suburban kids. Where three years earlier La Haine had been a shocking, visceral and violent portrayal of modern French culture, this was more thoughtful and measured but still pushed the nation's buttons, earning a Cesar nomination for director Lyece Boukhitine. Tautou would then move on to Bebes Boum, a comedy concerned with social mores, where she'd play the 17-year-old daughter of Zabou Breitman. Both women are pregnant by their respective boyfriends and neither is aware of the other's state. However, when Breitman finds out she demands that Tautou abort, potentially adding hypocrisy to an already complex emotional mix. Can they all come together as one big happy family?

Following this would come another TV movie, Laurent Zerah's comedy drama Chaos Technique where college professor Patrick Catalifo's life is turned upside down when he meets an old schoolmate he hasn't seen in 20 years. Suddenly he's involved in a series of unwelcome incidents, several involving Audrey, a student who's besotted by him and who he must save from suicide. Next would come Archi-degueulasse, another short for Lyece Boukhitine, one of three made in the Casting series. Once more there would be plaudits, this time when the film was screened at Cannes in May.

The year would end with Audrey appearing in an episode of Julie Lescaut, a popular Prime Suspect-style series where divorced police super Veronique Genest battled against macho culture to successfully balance work and home life. In Tautou's episode a rave party would go horribly wrong with several teenage drug casualties, one of whom is the daughter of a magistrate overseeing Lescaut's investigation. Audrey would be back on TV again in January, 1999, when she scored a yet more prominent role in the first TV movie to feature Inspector Deveure, otherwise known as Le Boiteux, the policeman star of the novels of Pascal Basset-Chercot (only in France could you get away with calling your lead character "the lame man"). Here the skeleton of a child is found in a house shared by Tautou and her golf instructor husband. She's pregnant, her marriage is falling apart and she's in mental turmoil, but of course there's a wealth of other suspects as Monsieur Game-leg delves further into the case.

Though she had yet to make a feature film debut, Audrey was certainly causing a stir in the world of TV, in 1998 winning the Best Young Actress award at the Bezier festival (the next year she'd be named Best Newcomer by the TV channel Canal +). This brought her to the attention of director Tonie Marshall, then casting for the high profile romantic comedy Venus Beauty Institute. Of Tatou's audition, Marshall would later say "She came, she made gaffes, she turned reddish, her ears were in a funny position, but in five minutes she gave me the heart of the character - a petite young girl who would like to be a lady and will become a woman". And she came so close to missing out altogether. Getting lost on her way to the audition, Tautou had turned up an hour late and only got a second chance once she'd burst into tears of disappointment.

Venus Beauty Institute would concern the love-lives of several employees of a Parisian beauty salon. One would be Nathalie Baye, a mature woman who's lost her faith in love and consoles herself with casual flings. Mathilde Seigneur would be popular with the boys, tough but inwardly desperate, while Audrey would be a naive country girl keen to achieve her co-workers' level of sophistication. Much of the comedy would be contained within the well-scripted girl talk, and much of that would concern Audrey's affair with Robert Hossain, a much-older widower who attends the salon to preserve the skin taken from his wife's thighs and grafted onto his face. He falls for Audrey, they enjoy a famously risque scene, and Baye plots to save her young colleague from a match that might actually turn out well.

Venus Beauty Institute was a reasonably sized hit in France, drawing 1.2 million to the cinema, and Tautou's stand-out performance would win her a Cesar. Only two years out of college, she was already on her way. Having ended 1999 with Triste A Mourir, a short where she travelled through the villages of northern France obsessively seeking friend Lucie Jeanne, she moved on to Marry Me, another romantic comedy. Here Michele Laroque would visit a sage, seeking help in rekindling her relationship with husband Vincent Perez, an architect and audacious climber. Unhelpfully the sage sees another man in her future and another woman in that of Perez, so Laroque must struggle against destiny to keep her marriage together - not easy once Perez has met young Audrey.

The year 2000 would see Tautou in no fewer than four movies. After Marry Me would come Pretty Devils, a meditation on absent fathers and their effect on children. Here two sisters, aged 19 and 13, are living with their mother and stepfather, their own father having drowned. Running wild, they descend into petty crime, stealing wallets and pulling a statutory rape scam, then they meet Audrey, a runaway who claims that the father who abandoned her now lives across the road from the girls. Together the three plot vengeful pranks to ruin the guy's life, pranks that go terribly wrong when they induce a heart attack.

Following Pretty Devils was costume romp The Libertine, the one film Tautou has said she regrets making, and NOT to be confused with the Johnny Depp movie of the same name. This saw her Marry Me paramour Vincent Perez star as the liberated author of the world's first encyclopaedia, a book frowned upon by both Church and State and thus being written and printed clandestinely at the chateau of a friendly baron. Fanny Ardant would appear as a mysterious spy, Michel Serrault as a cardinal seeking to destroy Perez's printing press. Josiane Balasko would play an insatiable countess, while Perez would run wild (and naked) through the grounds. And Audrey, poor Audrey, would play the baron's daughter, a virgin desperate for deflowering, bathing in milk with another girl and generally showing more flesh than was strictly necessary. As said, she would regret this later, feeling her disrobing had served no artistic purpose in a movie marked by crudity. Clumsy and crass, with a cornucopia of knob gags, lesbian titillation and naughty threesomes, it was a star-studded Gallic Carry On film.

Better would be Happenstance, concerned with chaos theory, in which Audrey would star with Faudel, an Algerian pop star making his film debut. This would begin with birthday girl Tautou being read her horoscope on the tube and being told she will discover love by the day's end. Sitting opposite is stranger Faudel - it's his birthday, too - and, as the pair go their separate ways, events begin to unfold that will eventually cause them to meet. Most of these events, awash with talk of fate and consequence, would have nothing to do with Audrey's character so, though she was the headliner, this was hardly a lead role. With her next movie, that would be far from the case.

Having endured a frenetic time at the helm of Alien: Resurrection, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the maverick director of Delicatessen and The City Of Lost Children, was presently getting back to his roots by penning a low-budget and tremendously quirky French fable. When Emily Watson, for whom he'd written the piece, pulled out on the grounds that her French was poor and signed on to make Gosford Park instead, Jeunet was left with an almighty gap to fill. Seeing Tautou's improbably interesting face staring out from the posters for Venus Beauty Institute, then watching her Cesar-winning performance, he knew he had his girl. And the movie, Amelie, was a revelation. In the title role, Tautou would play a young woman from a sad background who, due to a series of odd occurrences, decides to spend her life anonymously helping other people, her problem being that this might lead to a lonely future. However, in the course of her do-gooding, she charms a fellow who, unable to court her directly, leads her on a romantic treasure-hunt.

Sassy, bright, daring, whimsical and beautiful, Amelie was quite brilliant, and there was uproar when it was relegated to backstreet showings at Cannes. The French public would redress this balance by seeing it in vast numbers - 8.6 million at the final count - and the film would then take America by storm, raking in $33 million, making it the highest-grossing French language film ever in the States. There would be five Oscar nominations and a worldwide take of $100 million. Suddenly, Tautou, nominated for a Cesar once again, was her country's best-known actress.

But fame wasn't what was driving her (which would explain why she took off to Indonesia with one of her sisters when Amelie Fever first hit France). Time and again she'd stated that all she wanted was a new challenge, and so she would steer clear of the mainstream Hollywood fare on offer, instead seeking more "interesting" projects across Europe. Her first post-Amelie release would be the light comedy God Is Great, I'm Not (actually filmed two years earlier but shelved when the production company went bankrupt), where she'd reunite with fellow Florent alumnus Edouard Baer, star of her first TV feature Couer De Cible. Here she'd play an occasional model who, alienated from a mother in a dull second marriage and splitting from her boyfriend after undergoing an abortion, goes seeking for meaning in her life. Having tried Buddhism, she takes on Judaism, becoming entangled with Jewish vet Baer who, though a decent man in all respects, doesn't practise his religion - a major problem as Tautou is obsessed with it, even studying Hebrew.

Next would come He Loves Me . . . He Loves Me Not, a real oddity as it starts out as a cheerful romance then gradually mutates into a dark thriller. Here, undermining an audience expectation based on Amelie, she'd play a young artist madly in love with older married doctor - Samuel Le Bihan, another Florent alumnus. With the story being told from two different perspectives, Tautou had her new challenge, with her character perhaps being an innocent abused by the doctor, or perhaps an erotomaniac stalker.

Following He Loves Me, her second release of 2002 would be sex comedy The Spanish Apartment, another major hit in France. This was originally titled Euro-Pudding as it saw a group of students from across the continent all sharing a flat in Barcelona (Kelly Reilly would bring Englishness to the party), all of them engaged in various straight or gay romantic adventures. In a small but crucial role, and again putting distance between herself and Amelie, Tautou would play the bitchy, snotty and manipulative girlfriend of star Romain Duris, her crazy possessiveness causing their relationship to wither and forcing Duris to seek advice on how to please women from predatory lesbian flatmate Cecile de France.

Audrey would end the year with a further test, Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things. This was set in a tatty London hotel, peopled by immigrants - mostly illegal - who do the jobs to which most Londoners wouldn't stoop. Chiwetel Ejiofor would play a Nigerian doctor, now working as a cab driver and night porter, who discovers a human heart in the hotel's pipes and sets about discovering how it got there. Tautou would play a Turkish chambermaid who rents sofa space to Ejiofor and, much as she likes him, must accept that he is faithful to his wife back in Nigeria. It was a fascinating film, following the stories of the hotel's denizens and remaining sympathetic to their plight, but also working as a murder mystery, a political thriller and a love story. But it was tough for Tautou who spoke very little English, let alone English with a Turkish accent. She'd in fact worked with a voice coach, and picked up the necessary vocal rhythms from the large Turkish population of London's Stoke Newington. Eventually she'd learned her lines phonetically - any script changes were thus a real problem - and had to trust Frears entirely.

Tautou's search for a challenge would inevitably lead her towards France's premier directors. Next she'd take a small part in Lost Seamen, helmed by Claire Devers who'd caused controversy back in 1986 with Noir Et Blanc, based on Tennessee Williams' short story Desire And The Black Masseur. Lost Seamen would see a freighter sold and its crew disbanded in Marseilles. Three sailors, though - the captain, first officer and a young kid - have reason to stay onboard, venturing into the city only to look for love and excitement. It's on one such trip that the kid is expertly fleeced by two bar-girls, Audrey and Nozha Khonadra. Following this, Tautou would move on to Not On The Lips, a chance to work with Alain Resnais, the New Wave master who'd debuted back in 1959 with the classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour. The movie was an adaptation of Andre Barde's comic operetta from 1925, a sex farce involving Lotharios, cuckolds and long-lost loves, dodgy business deals and secret marriages. Exquisitely filmed, with all the cast singing their own songs, it would see Lambert Wilson as an American tycoon surrounded by a host of fabulously frivolous women with Tautou playing a virginal manhunter akin to Twiggy in The Boy Friend, vying with Sabine Azema for the rich man's attention. It was brilliant, sumptuous, light as a feather from a bird of paradise.

Tautou would end 2003 with her first American production, Amos Kollek's Nowhere To Go But Up, a typically idiosyncratic choice. Here she'd play a French actress seeking success in New York and sleeping rough outside the home of Justin Theroux, a blocked writer. She performs menial jobs while searching for auditions, all the while driving the cynical scribe crazy with her naive optimism. Finally, he writes a film for her, she stars in it and, well, aside from another out-there turn from Jennifer Tilly as a lesbian ex-convict poet, it was pretty sappy stuff.

2004 would bring the infinitely superior A Very Long Engagement, a reunion with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. In fact, when Tautou and Jeunet had attended the Oscars in the wake of Amelie, the director had asked her if she'd like to work with him again. A few weeks later he'd sent her Sebastian Japrisot's novel Un Long Dimanche De Fiancailles and so the process had begun, leading to a wearing six-month shoot. Set in the midst of WWI, the film would see Tautou as Mathilde, whose boyfriend Manech is accused of injuring himself to avoid action and sent out to die in No Man's Land. Suspecting that her lover was not killed, Mathilde then embarks on a long quest to find him, tracking down survivors and eyewitnesses. Though it did not shy away from the horror of the trenches, like all of Jeunet's work it was wholly enchanting, with Tautou, sporting a leg brace and a look of defiant determination, again superb and earning a third Cesar nomination. It was another massive hit in France, big enough to justify its $55 million cost.

Next Tautou would revisit an earlier hit when she joined the cast of The Russian Dolls, a sequel to The Spanish Apartment. Like the original, it was shot on digital video with MTV-style editing, making for grungey realism, but it would also attack the hypocrisy of the fashion and publishing industries and have greater romantic depth as Romain Duris, now a struggling writer, came to make serious life-choices, involving his career and his feelings for former flat-mate Kelly Reilly and supermodel Lucy Gordon. Tautou would now be Duris' ex, still cute and cranky but now depressed and yet more explosive as she's fathered a child by another man and still carries a torch for Duris. Comic absurdity would be added by the juxtaposition of her affairs with those of the lesbian Cecile de France.

By now engaged to Las Vegas-born Lance Mazmanian - a writer, actor, director, award-winning photographer and published poet - Tautou would next take on another major project, Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's enormo-seller The Da Vinci Code. To do this she had to fight off stern competition when President Jacques Chirac asked the producers to instead cast Sophie Marceau, a close friend of his daughter. Fortunately for Audrey, the producers stayed loyal and so she would play Sophie Neveu, the French cryptologist whose grandfather is murdered by sinister forces in the Louvres, causing her to join professor Tom Hanks in a search for the truth that would involve dark secrets, dangerous religious sects and even the Holy Grail itself. Naturally, being Tautou, she would avoid the Hollywood hoo-hah, remaining in her homeland for the French comedy Hors De Prix.

As said, after the international success of The Da Vinci Code, Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, Audrey Tautou could become the first modern French actress to really cut it on the world stage. However, also as said, she has made it clear that fame does not interest her, that she would deliberately take small roles if they pleased her more than the lead, and even that she would quit acting altogether if she found a preferable outlet for her creativity. Considering her track record after Amelie, she will be true to her word. So, here's to Audrey Tautou, the biggest French actress of today, but maybe gone tomorrow.

Dominic Wills