Sandrine Bonnaire Biography
Born: May 31, 1967
One of the most esteemed French actresses of her generation, Sandrine Bonnaire made her name playing complex and often rebellious women for such directors as Claude_Chabrol, Maurice_Pialat, Agnès Varda, and Patrice_Leconte.
Born in Gannta, Allier, France on May 31, 1967, Bonnaire grew up in a large family, the seventh of ten children. She made her entrance into the acting world while still in her early teens, taking parts in such films as La_Boum_2, the 1982 sequel to the popular coming-of-age film starring Sophie_Marceau. During this time, one of Bonnaire's sisters introduced her to Pialat, who cast her as the lead in À_Nos_Amours. Bonnaire's portrayal of a young girl who uses sex as a substitute for love made her a star in her native country, earning a César Award for Most Promising Young Actress. Two years later, Bonnaire won her second César, a Best Actress honor for her disturbing, uncompromising portrayal of a young drifter in Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond). Bonnaire spent the rest of the decade working steadily for some of France's most accomplished directors. Highlights included André_Téchiné's Les_Innocents (1987), which cast her as a woman caught in the Arab subculture of a small French coastal town; Pialat's Sous le Soleil de Satan (1987), in which Bonnaire played a troubled, pregnant teenager who kills the father of her unborn child; and Patrice_Leconte's Monsieur_Hire (1989), an acclaimed psychological drama in which she played the unwitting object of a man's voyeuristic obsession.
For her portrayal of Joan of Arc in Jacques_Rivette's Jeanne la Pucelle (1994), Bonnaire earned another Best Actress César nomination. The following year, she won more acclaim, including the Venice Film Festival's Volpi Cup, for her work in Claude_Chabrol's La_Cérémonie, a crime drama that cast her as the mousy, dyslexic maid of a wealthy couple. Following a few more dramatic turns, Bonnaire appeared in Rivette's psychological thriller Secret_Défense (1998), playing a medical researcher whose younger brother is hell-bent on getting revenge for their father's mysterious death. In 1999, Bonnaire returned to a more dramatic milieu with Chabrol's crime drama Au Coeur du Mensonge, and Regis_Wargnier's Est-Ouest, a historical drama that cast her as a young woman experiencing the hardships of postwar restructuring in her Russian husband's homeland. Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
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