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Fanny Ardant |
The French Diva of Passion She has been the femme fatale in plenty of French blockbusters including François Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door. Her career has spanned for almost 40 years and she’s appeared in more than 80 movies, and within her repertoire, holds a César Award for Best Actress. How did Fanny Ardant rise to fame? Born on March 1949 in Saumur Maine-et-Loire, France, Ardant and her family settled in Monaco where they were frequent visitors to the royal family house and where young Fanny met Princess Grace. After high school, Ardant relocated to Aix-en-Provence to study political science but her interests gradually turned toward acting, and she decided to pursue a career in the field. Fanny Ardant started taking classed with Jean Périmony and made her professional debut in a 1974 stage production of Corneille's Polyeucte. Eager for success, Ardant's first dose of praise came thanks to her performance in the TV movie Les dames de la côte (1979). Few years later she began her association with Truffaut, which would lead to both excellent work in The Woman Next Door (1981) and Confidentially Yours (1983). |
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In the following years, Fanny Ardant started to build a reputation for passionate roles in productions such as Un amour de Swann (1983), Love and Fear (1988), Colonel Chabert (1994), Ridicule (1996), and Gabriel Aghion's Pédale douce (1996), a broad comedy in which Ardant's uncharacteristic comic turn won her the 1997 Best Actress César. Thanks to her proficiency in English and Italian, Ardant has been able to star in productions from Hollywood, the UK, Italy and even Israel. Amongst one of her most remembered roles in recent years is her portrayal of the opera diva Maria Callas in Franco Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever. In recent years, Fanny Ardant has turned to directing and screenwriting, Ashes and Blood (2009) as her first production. A year later she wrote and directed the short film Absent Chimeras, and in 2013, Ardant released Obsessive Rhythms. Today, Fanny Ardant is still an active actress where her most recent role can be seen in the 2015 production For This Is My Body, by Paule Muret. |
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