She was incredibly beautiful, a pair of eyes as pure as a tempered sapphire, one from the sea, one from the sky.
She was so beautiful that she didn't cooperate with the photo shoot with her face covered by a bag, which was boycotted by all photojournalists.
After giving her beauty, God gave her unparalleled talent. I don't know whether to be happy or sad, in almost all the movies starring Isabelle Adjani, her opponents are eclipsed, even the "big nose lover" Gerald dePardieu such a master, in "Rodin's Lover", is also covered by her light into a "green leaf".
Her paranoia at times is precisely where she is the cutest. In 1997, Gong Li returned from the Cannes Film Festival, saying that she had only made one of her friends in Cannes that year. In 1993, Chen Kaige won the Palme d'Or in Cannes with "Farewell to the King". At that time, it was the actress who presented him the award.
The five-time French César Award-winning French legendary actress has a temperament that is out of place with the world: in real life she has never had the confidence to be a perfect beauty, and under the lens of the media, she is like a shy girl, rushing through the crowd of welcomes in the middle of nowhere, looking at the voices that shout for her with curious and sensitive eyes from time to time, as if wondering why people love her so much.
Isabelle Adjani was born on June 27, 1955, in a slum on the outskirts of Paris during the Algerian War. Her mother is German and her father is Algerian. In her childhood, she was deprived of material life, the living environment was frequently violent, and she suffered serious racial discrimination because she was at the bottom of society. This leads to the sensitive and irritable side of Adjani's personality. Later, due to the communication barrier caused by the language barrier, Adjani once suffered from autism.
She fell in love with amateur theater performances when she was in elementary school. According to her own later revealed, the initial performance was a way to vent her suppressed emotions, no one knows the adolescent period, she played a role, is her most loyal friend.
In 1969, at the age of 14, Adjani used her summer vacation to shoot her screen debut. At the age of 16, Adjani was admitted to the École de France. Later, while attending school, she participated in some stage plays and TV series. Later, she was admitted to the famous French Comedie Academy and performed many stage plays such as Molière's "Mrs. School". In 1974, Adjani's wonderful performance in the film "Slap" conquered everyone and won the Shanna Award for Acting.
At the age of 19, she was favored by French New Wave director François Truffaut as the daughter of Hugo in The Story of Adele Hugo. At that time, Truffaut's script was stranded several times because he couldn't find the right person to star, until he saw Adjani on the screen. He immediately wrote a letter to Adjani, which read: "With the exception of Jean Moreau, I have never been so eager to fix a face to film. He then wrote a second letter to Adjani, in which he wrote: "Your face alone tells a moving story... You can even act in a movie without a storyline... It will rival any feature film. ”
With "The Story of Adele Hugo", Adjani became famous in one fell swoop.
Before her, you didn't know that there was also a prose poetry face about crazy love.
Her unique dramatic face and personality allow her to navigate between a variety of difficult characters.
In 1981, with "Enchanted" (directed by Andrei Zulaski) and "Quartet" (directed by James Ivory), Adjani, who was shortlisted and finally sealed at the same time, took the lively Cannes red carpet out of the meaning of loneliness with a white gauze dress that did not eat human fireworks.
In Rodin's Lover, Adjani plays the sculptor Camille Claudel, a woman who spends the last 30 years of her life in a mental hospital. In the film, After separating from Rodin, Camille uses her memories to create a bust of Rodin, and she replaces the flesh-and-blood man who once loved her with a plaster-carved embrace.
Stills from Rodin's Lover
Because of the excessive commitment to acting, for a long time, Adjani could not get out of the role.
Stills from Queen Margot
At the age of 39, Adjani challenged the girlishness of 19 years old. In an epic work " Queen Margot "Queen Margot", she not only refreshed the peak of her appearance once again, but also refreshed the best state of an outstanding actress. With her exquisite performances, she makes this 162-minute historical biopic less lengthy and dull in the eyes of even culturally divided audiences. Adapted from Dumas's novel, Queen Margo depicts the famous tragedy in Western history, the "Night of St. Bartholomew", a fight between Catholics and Protestants. Covers killing, war, jealousy, humiliation, ambition and forgiveness.
Margaret, played by Adjani in the film, is a very controversial queen in French history. She was good-hearted, but because of her mother's lust, she married her unloved man, King Henry, and became involved in a bloody court conspiracy. Between the costume and the cup, in the midst of bloodshed and slaughter, she found her lover's eyes, but eventually lost him. At the end of this historical tragedy, the shot of her holding the head of her lover and desperately walking to the carriage to a foreign land is so heartbreaking. The innocence and cunning, tenacity and vulnerability, loneliness and passion, indifference and enthusiasm that appear on her face at the same time, reach the extreme in this work.
Over the years, some people who loved her and hated her described her as a woman who was repeatedly abandoned by scumbags and isolated and helpless, and this rumor came from her equally tortuous love life. In 1976, at the age of 21, Adjani met photographer Bruno Nuttan while filming Baroco. Since then, the two have lived together as partners, and this Bruno Nuttan is the director of Rodin's Lover. After filming "Rodin's Lover", Adjani, who was soaring in her career, failed to harvest a shining love, and Nutan could not bear that her aura was getting bigger and bigger than herself every day. The original pure relationship eventually became dim and dull, and after giving birth to a son for Nutan, Adjani waited only to say goodbye.
Adjani and Danny Day Lewis had a six-year love affair and gave birth to a son
The end of this relationship did not make Adjani lose confidence in love. Soon, she met someone as dazzling as she was– the award-winning professional, the son of a poet laureate, and one of Britain's most famous contemporary actors, Danny Day Lewis. The enthusiasm for performance makes the two people seem to have endless topics, six years of love together, the two brightest stars in the sky, like all couples, shopping, kissing, talking, it is a good time for the two of them. There is a theory that during their relationship, the two dropped many invitations, and Adjani rejected the film contracts for "Instinct" and "The Unethical Deal", which became popular with Sharon Stone and Demi Moore, and gave birth to Gabriel Kane, the son of Lewis. What followed was Lewis's breakup due to a different outlook on life, and he quickly fell in love with Arthur Miller's daughter and flashed marriage. Six years of companionship were finally over.
In the famous shot of "The Story of Adele Hugo", Adjani opened her eyes and said: "Thousands of mountains and rivers, thousands of mountains and rivers, to meet you, this kind of thing only I can do!" Her gaze penetrated the mountains and seas, penetrated all the figurative things, and reached an eternal place. This is the tone of Adele Hugo's life, and it is also the tone of Adjani's life. She and her character were never truly separated, just as she always believed in love, even if she was hurt by life, she still loved life itself.
Now 64 years old, Adjani is still single, living in seclusion in Switzerland, living a free and free life.
Adjani presented the Palme d'Or for "Farewell to the King"
In 1993, Chen Kaige won the Palme d'Or in Cannes with "Farewell to the Overlord". At that time, it was Adjani who presented him with the award. Chen Kaige recalled the Cannes Film Festival that year and was full of gratitude to Adjani. "I remember coming on stage was Isabelle Adjani who presented me with an award, and could have left, but she accompanied me and translated french for me. Isabelle told me that I really liked the film "Farewell to the King". I remember that after the first sentence of the acceptance speech was said, after Adjani translated it for me, there was applause from the audience. ”
If you think that Chen Kaige's passage describes a very thoughtful and appropriate "good" person, a woman with a high emotional intelligence, it is a big mistake. In fact, Adjani has a strong personality and is easily angry and impulsive. In the crew, she often stopped filming because she could not control her temper, or even quit the crew. In 2000, when performing the stage play "La Traviata", she even intervened in the script adaptation and repeated quarrels with the director, and successfully took away the first director. She also felt that the costume was too heavy, asked the costume designer to change it, couldn't bear to hang her name as a light box outside the theater, and refused to interview because she didn't like a host...
In 1997, Adjani's presidency of the jury at the Festival de Cannes was one of the long list of cases in Cannes history that has been criticized. For example, occupying the box reserved for the mayor of Cannes, asking all the jury members to get up early in the morning to have breakfast with her, and asking people to eat the same things as her.
In 1983, Adjani starred in the film "Summer of Killing" (directed by Jean Baker), which was shortlisted for the main competition in Cannes, and she angered the old memories by covering her face with a handbag on the opening red carpet and refusing to let reporters take pictures. The lack of emotional intelligence sparked resentment among the reporters present, who protested by laying cameras in a circle on the ground during the film's launch and then standing with Adjani on their backs. Later, when asked about Adjani's original intentions, she said that she just wanted everyone to focus on the work itself rather than on her.
Maybe you have to ask, how can such an Adjani win the award again and again, and not be banned? The answer is very obvious: the business ability is too strong, have to serve. Adjani, who is not highly educated, has always picked scripts and is too good at acting, so although her output is not high, she has hardly acted in a bad film.
Because of her straight-forward personality, she has left a strong impression on her collaborators and the media in the past, but her paranoia at some times is precisely her most adorable place. In 1997, Gong Li returned from Cannes as a member of the jury, and although she had her own opinions about the president's various deeds, she finally said that she had only made one good friend in Cannes that year, that is, Adjani. Then again, her selfless help to Chen Kaige is also because she really likes the movie "Farewell to the Overlord". This is consistent with her insistence on focusing more on her work.
She also spat foul words when her relationship failed, but when the trauma subsided, she was more relieved than anyone else. After being split by Danny Day Lewis, someone once asked her, do you think it is worth so much suffering for love? Her answer was: (The relationship) made me learn English. Love doesn't make people die, but makes people want to know more about themselves.
Although she has not been able to enter the marriage hall with the father of the child twice, and although she has stumbled all the way through the love, Adjani will never be willing to let herself become the victim of that love, a tragic character. The real Adjani is more complex than the complex woman she plays in the film, she has a more tenacious vitality, she is single, but not alone. She said: "I'm having a good, enjoyable life, living a full life, passionate, full of curiosity. "This may be the truth of life. The on-screen ferocity does not point to eternity, as Margaret Duras, the French predecessor of Isabelle Adjani, said in the book Lover, "I love your devastated face now more than the beautiful face of your youth."
Author: Chen Xihan
Editor: Chen Xihan