Isabelle Yasmine Adjani LdH (born 27 June 1955) is a French actress and singer of Algerian and German descent.
Isabelle Yasmine Adjani was born on 27 June 1955 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, to Mohammed Cherif Adjani, an Algerian Muslim from Constantine, and Emma Augusta "Gusti" Schweinberger, a German Catholic from Bavaria.
Adjani's parents met near the end of World War II, when her father was in the French Army.
They married and her mother returned with him to Paris, despite not speaking a word of French.
She asked him to take Cherif as his first name as she thought it sounded more "American".
Isabelle grew up bilingual, speaking French and German fluently, in Gennevilliers, a northwestern suburb of Paris, where her father worked in a garage.
After winning a school recitation contest, Adjani began acting by the age of 12 in amateur theater.
1970
At the age of 14, Adjani starred in her first motion picture, Le Petit Bougnat (1970).
1972
She first gained fame as a classical actress at the Comédie-Française, which she joined in 1972.
She was praised for her interpretation of Agnès, the main female role in Molière's L'École des femmes. She soon left the theatre to pursue a film career.
1974
Her other notable film roles include The Slap (1974), The Tenant (1975), Barocco (1976), The Driver (1978), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), All Fired Up (1982), Subway (1985), Ishtar (1987), Diabolique (1996), Adolphe (2002), Bon voyage (2003), French Women (2014), The World Is Yours (2018) and Peter von Kant (2022).
After minor roles in several films, she enjoyed modest success in the 1974 film La Gifle (The Slap), which François Truffaut saw.
1975
Her portrayal of Adèle Hugo in The Story of Adèle H. (1975) earned Adjani her first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, which made her, at 20, the youngest nominee in that category at the time.
He immediately cast her in her first major role in his The Story of Adèle H. (1975) which he had finished writing five years prior.
Critics praised her performance, with the American critic Pauline Kael describing her acting talents as "prodigious".
Only 19 when she made the film, Adjani was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, becoming the youngest Best Actress nominee at the time (a record she held for almost 30 years).
1976
She successfully passed her baccalauréat and was auditing classes at the University of Vincennes in 1976.
Adjani had a younger brother, Éric, who was a photographer.
1978
She quickly received offers for roles in Hollywood films, such as Walter Hill's 1978 crime thriller The Driver.
She had previously turned down the chance to star in films like The Other Side of Midnight. She had described Hollywood as a "city of fiction" and said, "I'm not an American. I didn't grow up with that will to win an award."
Truffaut on the other hand said, "France is too small for her. I think Isabelle is made for American cinema."
She agreed to make The Driver because she was an admirer of Hill's first film Hard Times.
Adjani said:
"I think he is wonderful, very much in the tradition of Howard Hawks, lean and spare. The story is contemporary but also very stylized, and the roles that Ryan and I play are like Bogart and Bacall. We are both gamblers in our souls and we do not show our emotions or say a lot. For us, talk is cheap. I am really quite a mysterious girl in this film, with no name and no background. And I must say that it is restful not to have a life behind me; this way, I don't have to dig deep to play the part. All I know is that life for me is gambling and I am a loser. I have what people call a poker face."
The film was seen more than 1.1 million times in Adjani's native France but did not do as well in the US.
1979
She played Lucy in the German director Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of Nosferatu which was well-received critically and performed well at box offices in Europe.
Roger Ebert loved the film, calling Herzog's casting of Adjani one of his "masterstrokes" in the film.
He wrote that she "is used here not only for her facial perfection but for her curious quality of seeming to exist on an ethereal plane."
The cast and the crew filmed both English- and German-language versions simultaneously upon request of 20th Century Fox, the American distributor, as Kinski and Ganz could act more confidently in their native language.
1981
She is the only performer to win five César Awards for acting—all in the Best Actress category—for Possession (1981), One Deadly Summer (1983), Camille Claudel (1988), La Reine Margot (1994), and Skirt Day (2009).
She won the Cannes Film Festival Award for her performances in Possession and Quartet (1981), becoming the only actress to win for two films in the same competition slate, and a Berlin Silver Bear for Camille Claudel.
In 1981, she received a double Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress award for her roles in the Merchant Ivory film Quartet, based on the novel by Jean Rhys, and in the horror film Possession (1981).
The following year, she received her first César Award for Possession, in which she had portrayed a woman having a nervous breakdown.
1983
In 1983, she won her second César for her depiction of a vengeful woman in the French blockbuster One Deadly Summer, and starred with Michel Serrault in the black diamond thriller Deadly Circuit directed by Claude Miller.
That same year, Adjani released the French pop album Pull marine, written and produced by Serge Gainsbourg.
She then starred in a music video for the hit title song, Pull Marine, which was directed by Luc Besson.
1988
In 1988, she co-produced and starred in a biopic of the sculptor Camille Claudel.
1990
Her second Best Actress nomination came in 1990 for portraying Camille Claudel, making her the first French actress to receive two Academy Award nominations for foreign-language films.
2010
She was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 2010 and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2014.
