Mar 09, 2011 Filed Under: News Comments (0)
today we celebrate Juliette’s 47-b-day. Wishing you a wonderful Birthday, La Binoche.
I found this article that I liked really much.
La Binoche: young at heart
HAPPY birthday Juliette! That’s a cry that will echo from Paris to Hollywood to London and even to parts of South Africa today.
French actress Juliette Binoche has often been referred to as the thinking man’s crumpet, though that does scant justice to a beautiful, talented and intelligent woman who will wake up 47 years young today.
Born in Paris on March 9, 1964, both Binoche’s parents were actors and directors so her DNA certainly didn’t hinder her progress. But they divorced when she was just four years old and she and her sister Marion were sent to a Catholic boarding school. Referring to her childhood, she once said:
“My earliest memory is loneliness. That’s a hard thing to live with.”
The South African connection is a strong one. She regards Nelson Mandela as the public figure she most admires and she said this about the republic after making John Boorman’s In My Country (based on the book by Anjie Krog): “Going to South Africa has changed me utterly. I have seen and heard about acts of cruelty and hatred which are hard to comprehend. But I’ve also seen peace and tranquillity like nowhere else on Earth.”
I, like many others, first saw Binoche on screen in Phil Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), based on the novel by Milan Kundera.
Binoche portrayed the young and innocent Tereza who marries the film’s principal character, a Czech surgeon named Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) who also has a lover, Sabina (Lena Olin).
Set at the time of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968, the film was a major success. “La Binoche” had arrived on the world stage.
Not surprisingly she said recently about her career: “I want to make films that are political and social. Films with a message or an idea. Films that dare to ask.”
There are three films that she is most popularly associated with. The first was an art film by the distinguished Polish director, Krzystof Kieslowski, Three Colours Blue.
It was the first in a trilogy, with White and Red to follow, that reflected the revolutionary colours of the French flag.
Blue represents liberty, white equality and red fraternity.
In Blue, Binoche plays a woman who is the sole survivor of a car crash that kills her husband and daughter. One of the questions the film asks is whether, now that her family no longer exists, she is “free” to build a new life for herself.
Binoche gives a haunting performance as the woman who, despite everything, still finds herself caged in by emotions that she wants to shed.
Talking about the film after Kieslowski’s death, she told the interviewer that the great director had once told a colleague: “If Juliette can’t make this movie, I don’t want to do it.”
The film premiered at the 1993 Venice Film Festival and landed Binoche the Best Actress prize. She also received a César Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe nomination.
The second, even bigger profile film was The English Patient, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje and directed by Anthony Minghella.
Binoche played a nurse who cared for a mystery man found in an aircraft wreck during World War II.
The role earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
The third film was Chocolat, based on the novel by Joanne Harris and directed by Lasse Hallstrom. It’s the story of a woman who opens a “chocolaterie” in a conservative French village.
The sumptuous chocolate she makes dissolves the reservations of the villagers and antagonises the mayor who feels that his hold on civic affairs has been undermined.
The film, which also starred Johnny Depp, was a worldwide hit which earned Binoche a European Film Award for Best Actress and an Academy Award nomination.
Binoche has made all kinds of films, from French costume dramas (The Horseman on the Roof of the World) to English tragedies (Damage, with Jeremy Irons). Her most recent major role was in Michael Haneke’s Caché, a sinister political whodunnit first shown at the Durban International Film Festival.
Binoche is the first actress to win the European “triple crown” of Best Actress awards at Venice (Three Colours Blue), Berlin (The English Patient) and Cannes (Certified Copy).
She will be seen on South African screens next year in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which is due to start principal photography in May.
source
Relative Insanity 
Certified Copy 
