Marion Cotillard

Biography

Academy Award-winning Actress Marion Cotillard was born on September 30, 1975 in Paris. Cotillard is the daughter of Jean-Claude Cotillard, an actor, playwright and director, and Niseema Theillaud, an actress and drama teacher. Her father's family is Breton.Raised in Orléans, France, she made her acting debut as a child with a role in one of her father's plays. She studied drama at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique in Orléans. After small appearances and performances in theater, Cotillard had occasional and minor roles in television series such as Highlander (1992) and Extrême limite (1994), but her career as a film actress began in the mid-1990s. While still a teenager, Cotillard made her cinema debut in the film L'histoire du garçon qui voulait qu'on l'embrasse (1994) and had small but noticeable roles in such films as Arnaud Desplechin's My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (1996), Coline Serreau's comedy La belle verte (1996).In 1996, she had her first leading role in the TV film Chloé (1996).In 1997, she won her first film award at the festival Rencontres Cinématographiques d'Istres in France, for her performance as the young imprisoned Nathalie in the short film Affaire classée (1997).Her first prominent screen role was Lilly Bertineau in Gérard Pirès's box-office hit Taxi (1998), a role which she reprised in two sequels: Taxi 2 (2000) and Taxi 3 (2003), this role earned her first César award nomination (France's equivalent to the Oscar) for Most Promising Actress in 1999.In 1999, Cotillard starred as Julie Bonzon in the Swiss war drama War in the Highlands (1999). For her performance in the film, she won the Best Actress award at Autrans Film Festival in France.In 2001, starred in Pretty Things (2001) as the twin sisters Marie and Lucie, and was…