Sabine Azéma

Sabine Azéma, French actress, was born in Paris, in 1949. She began by studying Classical Studies, but soon she enrolled in Jean Périmony’s theater classes and, at age 20, she joined the Conservatory, where she learned from Antoine Vitez, one of the greatest French theater educators of the 20th Century.  Making a mark with her roles as a bold, insolent youngster, she met the director of the Cómedie des Champs-Elysées, who gave her her first big role, in the play La Valse des Toréadors, by Jean Anouilh, in 1974. Thanks to her performance in that play, Azéma received countless offers and made her debut on television in 1975 and on cinema in 1976, in Geroges Lautner’s comedy On Aura Tout Vu. After some more cinema roles, she met Alain Resnais, the iconic French director who would have a decisive influence on Azéma’s acting career. In the 1983 film La Vie Est un Roman, she had her first role directed by Resnais. She would have 9 other roles until 2014, the year when the director passed away. In 1998, after five films together, Azéma and Resnais got married. The actress’s unveiling to the wider audience, however, came under the directing of Bertrand Tavernier, who chose her for the film A Sunday in the Country (1984), a role that would earn Azéma her first Cesar award for best actress. She would win the same award two years later for her performance in Alain Resnais’s Mélo (1986) and, since then, she has been nominated four other times for the Cesar for Best Actress. Although she is linked to an intellectual cinephilia, due to her many works with Resnais or, for instance, her recent role in Andrzej Zulawaski’s Cosmos (2014), Sabine Azéma did not avoid some more popular and mainstream movies, where her inclination for comedy was showcased. She made her debut as a director in 1992, with a tribute film, Bonjour Monsieur Doisneau, to photographer Robert Doisneau, who she was friends with.