Elegant french lady: Mélanie Laurent
Mélanie Laurent (born 21 February 1983) is a French actress, model, director, singer, and writer. She won the César Award for Most Promising Actress for her performance in I’m Fine, Don’t Worry in 2006. She became known to international audiences for her role as Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, for which she won Best Actress from the Online Film Critics Society and the Austin Film Critics Association.While she may not be a beauty in the classic sense like legendary French screen sirens Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot, with her pixie-like charm and big, expressive eyes Melanie Laurent ranks as pretty damn cute nonetheless. She radiates a natural, understated magnetism on screen that she must also possess off screen, considering how she caught the attention of actor Gerard Depardieu, who was instrumental in her becoming an actress. Her sexy French accent is a turn-on as well.
Although Melanie Laurent may be largely unknown to English-speaking moviegoers, she’s been hailed as one of France’s leading young actresses thanks to a series of strong performances in a number of critically acclaimed films. Her portrayal of Lili Tellier in Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas earned her the prestigious Prix Romy Schneider in October 2006, and the trophies kept right on coming as the 2007 awards season got underway. In addition to winning the Lumiere Award for Most Promising Young Actress and an Étoile d’Or as Best Female Newcomer, Melanie Laurent scored a much coveted César (the French Oscar equivalent) as Most Promising Actress for her work. 2008 marked her debut as an auteur with a film entitled De moins en moins, which she wrote and directed. It went on to earn her a Golden Palm nomination for Best Short Film at Cannes. English-speaking filmgoers will recognize her talents in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 offering Inglourious Basterds’ in which she portrays French Nazi-fighter Shoshana Dreyfus.
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Laurent has appeared in 20 films between 1999 and 2009. Playing a depressed 19 year-old who longed for her lost twin brother, she starred in Philippe Lioret’s I’m Fine, Don’t Worry (2006), for which she won a César Award for Most Promising Actress. In 2006, Laurent and Belgian actor Jérémie Renier were awarded France’s Romy Schneider and Jean Gabin Prizes for “most promising actor and actress.”In 2008, Laurent directed and wrote De moins en moins, which was nominated for Best Short Film at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival. It is a 7-minute film about a patient who, in front of her psychiatrist, “remembers less and less”. Laurent also directed À ses pieds, an erotic short film aired on the French television channel Canal+ on 25–26 October 2008, as part of a series of such shorts, called X Femmes, shot by female directors with the goal of producing erotica from a female point of view.Laurent was scheduled to direct her first play, Mi-cuit cœur pistache (the name of a dessert she particularly likes) in January 2009 at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris.
She had to abandon the project during the preparations and rehearsals when she was cast as Shosanna Dreyfus in the Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds, a French-language role for which she had to learn to speak English for a few scenes. Her then-partner Julien Boisselier, as well as Marie Denarnaud, Mélanie Doutey and Louise Monot were to act in the production while short movie clips were to be projected on stage, some of them shot at the nightclub Le Baron, which Laurent used to frequent during the writing period.Laurent also had planned another feature film, Putain de pluie!, whose script she co-wrote with Morgan Perez and which she intended to direct, produced by Alain Attal’s Productions du Trésor. Originally set for filming in the spring of 2009, it was postponed because of her work on Inglourious Basterds. Knowing that she could speak French and had already acted in French in one of the short films in Paris, je t’aime she offered the first role to Natalie Portman, who declined because of the language of the script. Laurent played the part of the violinist in Radu Mihăileanu’s Le Concert—she called it “a smart movie and a popular movie, and I’m glad because French people wanted to watch a movie with classical music.”Mélanie Laurent was the hostess of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 64th Cannes Film Festival. In 2011 she appeared opposite Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer in Beginners, and in 2013 appeared in the caper film Now You See Me.
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