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Juliette Binoche: Nutshell Factoids Juliette Binoche: The David Thomson Essay 'Chocolat' Screened
in Berlin BERLIN (AP) - French actress Juliette Binoche's taste for chocolate hasn't been dulled at all by being surrounded by sweets in Lasse Hallstrom's "Chocolat.'' "I love all of it, I want a black one, white one, milky one. I want all of it,'' she said Saturday after a screening of the film at the Berlin International Film Festival. "I'm very flexible about chocolate.'' In the film, the Oscar-winning Binoche plays Vianne Rocher, who arrives in a small southern French town in 1959 with her young daughter and upsets the town's staunch reserve with her luscious confections. The film also stars Hallstrom's wife, Lena Olin, as Josephine Muscat, a woman who is "cured'' by chocolate. Olin said she can see the eternal appeal of chocolate as something forbidden. "It's a crossing of a line that you're doing something sinful,'' she said. "You always have to make excuses when you see someone eating chocolate.'' "Chocolat,'' considered a possible contender in Tuesday's Academy Award nominations for acting and a long shot for best picture, also stars Johnny Depp and Judi Dench. "Movies are open doors, and at every door, I change character and life...I live for the present always. I accept this risk. I don't deny the past, but it's a page to turn." -- Juliette. I first remember falling in love with Juliette Binoche shortly before Blue came out in late 1993. And it is love that she and I share. I had already seen her in Damage and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I liked her in those. I liked the sex in those films very much. But there was a lot of hype for Blue and a lot of articles and photos from the film, and there was this one picture of Juliette wearing this big sweater and looking back over her shoulder. She was the most beautiful woman ever. So, I saw Damage and ULB again. I also managed to see an early French film she did called Rendez-vous, and a short film by Mike Figgis (part of Women & Men 2 done for HBO). Then Blue came out. I saw it at the old Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto (now a Border's Books). The theatre was near closing down. I sat near the back, on the right side, on the aisle. Blue was amazing. I was spellbound by Juliette's sad, quiet beauty. The movie opens with a car wreck. Her husband and young daughter die and she spends the rest of the film dealing with that. I think that Juliette's performance in this film is her greatest performance ever. I also think it is the greatest performance given by an actress ever. And I don't want to hear any of your Katharine Hepburn shit. Blue was the first part of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy. Each film dealt with a color of the French flag and what it stood for: liberty (Blue), equality (White), fraternity (Red). She said of Blue: "I think this is one of the most intimate films I have ever made, as it is linked to the intimacy of a friend's true story." Juliette received the Best Actress Cesar for her moving performance in this film. When a woman makes relatively few films and they come from France, there is often a long, hungry wait. She had brief cameos in White and Red, but otherwise, I had to wait, I think, nearly four years for The Horseman on the Roof (Le Hussard sur le Toit). The most expensive film in French history ($35 million), The Horseman on the Roof starred Juliette as a beautiful woman, ha ha. In 1832, cholera ravages Provence (South of France). After several misadventures a young Italian officer (Olivier Martinez) hunted by the Austrian secret police, meets Juliette. After a second accidental meeting, both will start in search of her husband in a chaotic country. Juliette manages to keep most of her private life a secret from the press (they are very good at this in France), but little bits manage, at times, to slip through. Juliette had a relationship with her young co-star, Martinez. Her background is theatrical. Born in Paris on March 9, 1964, her father is the theatre director Jean-Marie Binoche, her mother the actress Monique Stalens. They divorced when she was four, and Juliette was sent to a boarding school - which she hated. "But it taught me independence, and how to act. You had to construct a private life for yourself, so you did it by being someone else, play-acting, even in the playground between lessons." Juliette's sister Marion Stalens is a photographer and has taken many photos of Juliette. Her first starring role was in Andre Techine's Rendez-vous, for which she received the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1985. There followed a long relationship - and two films - with Leos Carax. Carax has been described as her Pygmalion: for Mauvais sang (1985) he remodelled her according to his vision of the character of Anna. She was made to lose weight, to take singing and dancing lessons, to read Balzac and Radiguet, and to listen to the voice of Cocteau. She even learnt sky-diving for one scene in the movie. For Carax's gruelling film Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1990) she learnt to water-ski. In September 1995, she replaced Isabella Rossellini as the new face of Lancome in their advertising for the perfume Poeme. (In French the name is a pun on "peau-aime", with the suggestion of "lovely skin".) According to Lancome, she was chosen for her "astonishing ability to express two things at once: tranquillity on the surface, fire and passion inside." Juliette reportedly receives over $1 million a year from this contract, for less than two weeks' work. Juliette is romantically involved with the actor Benoit Magimel, whom she met during the filming of Les Enfants du Siecle (1999). She lives in the suburbs of Paris with their baby daughter Hana (born in 1999) and her son Raphael (born in 1993, from an earlier relationship with Andre Halle, a professional scuba diver). Juliette is also godmother to a number of Cambodian orphans, the result of her association with Aspeca, a children's charity she supports with her earnings from Lancome. Her recent Oscar success is the culmination of a long series of awards and nominations for her role in Anthony Minghella's The English Patient. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role. Legendary actress Lauren Bacall was roundly expected to win in that category for her performance in Mirror Has Two Faces, The (1996), but Binoche won the Oscar instead, in one of the biggest surprise wins in Oscar history. In her acceptance speech, she said, "I don't have a speech prepared. I thought Lauren would get it." Commenting on the intense interest aroused by the Oscar, she remarked: "For a few days, I felt like the Queen of France." Given Juliette's love of privacy, the irony of this remark may have been intentional: the last French queen was paraded through the streets and guillotined. Juliette has finished 3 major French films that have not yet come to America: as George Sand in Enfants du Siecle, Alice and Martin, and La Veuve de Saint-Pierre. I was lucky enough to see the Veuve de Saint-Pierre when I was in Paris in April 2000. I kind of followed it. She is also at work on Code inconnu, Eloge de l'amour for Godard, and Chocolat. Chocolat is a recent book by Joanne Harris. I just finished it in preparation for the film, directed by Lasse Hallstrom. Great cast: Leslie Caron, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Alfred Molina, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugh O'Conor, Lena Olin, Peter Stormare, John Wood. You may recall that Hallstrom and Olin are married, and that Olin costarred with Juliette 12 years ago in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Peter Stormare was in Damage with Juliette and Leslie Caron. Caron played Juliette's mother in Damage, and I think here, too. Much of the above biographical information was stolen (lots of it verbatim) from other sites, especially Belles du Jour.
Born March 9, 1964, Paris, France Significant Others: Family: Education: Awards:
From David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Third Edition, 1994: Juliette Binoche, b. Paris, 1960 [incorrect date -- actual date: 1964] Watching Blue (93, Krzysztof Kieslowski), you begin to wonder if there has ever been a more beautiful woman in movies than Binoche. You fancy that Kieslowski has succumbed to this thought, too. How many ways are there of watching her grave face? Are the cheeks carved by love's gaze? Did that hair fall on her head like night? And the eyes... are they part of her life, or their own living creatures? And yet... if only this magnificient, melancholy, and nearly stunned woman had just a touch of... Debbie Reynolds? Perhaps she is too solemn, though Phil Kaufman got a great smile and a better blush from her in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (88). Moreover, she was a startling and often naked sexual explorer in Rendez-Vous (85, Andre Techine). She was also to be seen to great advantage in Hail Mary (85, Jean-Luc Godard) and Bad Blood (86, Leos Carax). But the nearly complete resignation of Blue did seem like the next stage of an illness that fell on her in the grisly Damage (92, Louis Malle), where her passion was inseparable from anomie. I have not been able to see it yet, but I am told she is outstanding in Les Amants du Pont Neuf (92, Carax). She has also done a Wutheing Heights (93, Peter Kosminsky), with Ralph Fiennes as her Heathcliff. In just a few films she has established herself as an immense, albeit passive presence. She may prove one of the great Actresses, but she could become as fixed as a still. The Assumption
of the Virgin (2002) .... Lucrezia Buti Interview in re English Patient The First Juliette Binoche Fan Page Un Regard sur Juliette Binoche Official Film Sites Ted,
if Juliette Binoche is your very favorite, has been for so many years
now, then how come you have an extensive Isabelle Huppert page filled
with pictures and nothing on JB until now, and no pictures for JB? Why
no pix?
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