Marion Cotillard is the only actor to win an Oscar speaking French
Playing Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose earned Marion Cotillard the Academy Award for Best Actress, and no other performer has ever won an Oscar for a role delivered in French. She had been acting since the age of six, and first spoke English on camera at seventeen in an episode of Highlander.
Cotillard was born in Paris on 30 September 1975 and spent her early childhood on the 18th floor of a tower block in Alfortville, a suburb south of the city. At 11 her family moved to rural Loiret, and later to La Beauce near Orléans, where her father started a theatre company. Both parents performed: her mother, Niseema Theillaud, acts and teaches drama, and her father, Jean-Claude Cotillard, is an actor, director and former mime of Breton descent. As a girl she imitated Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks in her bedroom and learned Singin' in the Rain by heart.
She first went on stage at three, opposite her mother, and appeared in a TF1 short film in 1982. At 15 she entered the drama conservatoire in Orléans, paying her way by making keychains to sell in sweet shops, and after graduating in 1994 she moved to Paris. Her first feature role, a small part in a Philippe Harel comedy, came that year when she was 18.
The 1998 action comedy Taxi, which sold more than six million tickets in France, made her name and brought a nomination for Most Promising Actress at the Césars. She went on to win a supporting César for A Very Long Engagement in 2004, broke into Hollywood with Big Fish in 2003, and picked up a second Oscar nomination for Two Days, One Night in 2014, playing a factory worker fighting to keep her job. English-language work includes Inception and The Dark Knight Rises.
Her films have taken more than $3.7 billion worldwide and drawn over 76 million admissions in France. Off screen she has spoken for Greenpeace since 2001 and fronted campaigns for the Lady Dior handbag and Chanel No. 5. France made her a Knight of Arts and Letters in 2010 and raised her to Officer in 2016, the same year she joined the Legion of Honour.
Source: Marion Cotillard
