France has quite a few grandes dames of cinema, with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Adjani all very much in the game. But none can hold much of a candle to Isabelle Huppert, who is firing on all cylinders as she enters her 70s, in her sixth decade of headline acting performances. Tightly wound and fiery, while simultaneously self-contained and tough as nails, Huppert’s acting persona has been instrumental to a string of masterpieces – and even if the film around her isn’t that great, she’s always magnificent to watch.
With so many amazing credits, stretching back to the 1970s, it’s hard to pick out a few, but we’ll have a go: early attention-grabbers like The Lacemaker and The Judge and the Assassin that graduated to fully-fledged lead performances in Loulou and Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary. Then the really extraordinary ones: La Cérémonie, Ruth Rendell’s scary domestic thriller; the traumatic and traumatising The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke; Claire Denis’ steely White Material; and, of course, Paul Verhoeven’s transgressive rape thriller Elle, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
