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Audrey Tautou (born August 9, 1978) is a French film actress, known to worldwide audiences for playing the title character in the award-winning film Amélie (2001, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) and also Sophie Neveu in The Da Vinci Code (2006). A dark-haired gamine who was something of a throwback to actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron, Audrey Tautou made an auspicious film debut as the sweetly innocent beauty salon worker who engages in a flirtation with an older gentleman in "Venus Beaute Institut" (1999), for which she earned the Cesar as most promising female newcomer. Tautou was born in the Puy-de-Dôme département of Auvergne, and was raised in Montluçon in the nearby Allier, still in Auvergne. Her father is a dental surgeon and her mother is a teacher. She has a younger brother and two younger sisters. Even now, many of her trips and voyages abroad are influenced by her passions for monkeys and gorillas. In fact, after the premiere of the film Amélie (for which she received phenomenal amounts of paparazzi and press coverage) she travelled to the jungles of Indonesia to help with the preservation of a monkey sanctuary. Tautou showed an interest in comedy at an early age and started her acting lessons at the Cours Florent. This theatrical institution is highly prestigious and she is one of several famous actors to have passed through its doors (others including Muriel Robin, Daniel Auteuil and Guillaume Canet). Nonetheless, she continued the course and came out at the end and went on to star in some of French cinema's biggest and most famous films. She began her performing career in a series of made for French television movies and shorts that displayed her beauty and talent. Selected as the winner of a competition sponsored by Canal+, she landed her first film. Subsequent to that breakthrough role, Tautou appeared as a teen runaway in "Voyous voyelles" (1999) and supported Vincent Perez in two 2000 releases: "Epouse-moi" and the sex comedy "Le Libertin". She displayed her charms and her flair for romantic comedy as the heroine of the "Happenstance/Le Battement d'ailes du papillon" (2001). Tautou has said that Meryl Streep, Paul Newman, Juliette Lewis, Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore are her acting idols. In 1998, Tautou participated in a Star Search-like competition sponsored by Canal+ called "Jeunes Premiers" (The Young Debut) and won Best Young Actress at the 9th Béziers Festival of Young Actors. Then, she came to the attention of Tonie Marshall, who gave her a role in the César-winning Venus Beauty Institute (1999, aka Vénus beauté (institut)). In 2000 , she won the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti as her country's most promising young film actress. Tautou caught her biggest break, though, when British actress Emily Watson dropped out of a proposed teaming with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. After auditioning for the role of a Monmartre waitress who embarks on fixing the lives of others while neglecting her own, the charismatic and beautiful actress landed the star-making role in the whimsical "Le Fableux destin d'Amelie Poulain" (2001) which became a box-office juggernaut in France. With a shortened title, "Amelie", the film, propelled by Tautou's sly and charming turn, went on to enchant critics and audiences throughout the world. Already well-known in France for her work in Venus Beauty Institute, in 2001 Tautou rose to international fame for her performance as the eccentric Amélie in the romantic French comedy Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. In June 2004 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). She accepted the invitation and is still a member as of September 1, 2006. Tautou next graced screens in a trio of French films, first as a young woman searching for love and spirituality in "Dieu est Grand, je suis Toute Petite" aka "God is Great, I'm Not" (2002), a medical student involved with a married doctor in À la Folie... pas du Tout" aka "He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not" (2002) and as part of the international ensemble of "Auberge espagnole, L'" aka "Pot Luck" (2002). Tatou's next major role was for director Stephen Frears in "Dirty Pretty Things" (2003), a dark and shadowy thriller in which she played an illegal Turkish immigrant whose morally upright lover uncovers sinister activities at the hotel where he works. She rejoined “Amelie” director Jean-Pierre Jeunet for his next film, “A Very Long Engagement” (2004), an ambitious, if not flawed World War I drama. Tatou played a beautiful French woman with a bum leg from a childhood bout with Polio whose fiancé (Gaspard Ulliel) is caught inflicting a wound on himself in order to be sent home from the front. Along with four other ne’er-do-wells, her fiancé is marched to the hinterland between the French and German lines where the cowards are sure to be killed. Despite receiving word of her fiancé’s death, she knows deep down he’s still alive and hires a private detective (Ticky Holgado) to find him after the war. In 2005, Tautou worked in her first full Hollywood production, opposite Tom Hanks, in the film version of Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and released in May 2006. She acted alongside Gad Elmaleh in Pierre Salvadori's Hors de prix, released December 13, 2006. Tautou says she still considers France her base, and plans to pursue a career predominantly there rather than crossing over to the United States. As she told Stevie Wong of The Straits Times, "I am, at the end of the day, a French actress. I am not saying I will never shoot an English-language movie again, but my home, my community, my career is rooted in France. I would never move to Los Angeles". Tautou starred with Guillaume Canet (best known outside of France for his role in the film adaptation of The Beach) in Claude Berri's French-language Ensemble, c'est tout in 2007, an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Anna Gavalda. Her favourite authors are Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, Paul Auster, and Timothy Zahn; and her favourite poets are Charles Baudelaire and Tristan Tzara. Tautou takes pictures of each reporter who interviews her and keeps them in a scrapbook. Tautou has said that "Everyone [outside France] thinks I have an ethnic origin", though she is actually "100-percent French". In France, many consider her as the "typical Occitan Auvergnate". She was brought up attending church, though she has now stated that she is "not officially" a Catholic. The Brand New song 'Tautou', from the album Déjà Entendu is named after her. |
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