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French actors are migrating from the cinema as Parisian theatres recover from crisis-deflated 2009

She may never have played for Manchester United but she does now have something in common with Eric Cantona.

Audrey Tautou, the most successful and highest paid of a new generation of French cinema actresses, followed Le Grand Eric last week by becoming the latest of a series of high-profile transfers from the French screen to the stage.

Tautou, 33, who was projected to world stardom by her roles in Amélie (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2006), has made her theatrical debut in Paris in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Audrey comfortably outscored Eric. Cantona received, at most, polite reviews last month for his gutsy, but sometimes inaudible performances, just off the Champs-Elysées, as a dying man trapped in the ruins of a supermarket. Tautou has received rave reviews for her performance as Nora Helmer, a young wife who tries to escape from the suffocation of a conventional, 19th-century bourgeois marriage. The theatre critic of Le Parisien said that she was “irresistible”.

Both Cantona and Tautou are part of a wider emigration from French cinema to theatre, as the Paris stage tries to recover from a disappointing, crisis-deflated 2009. Another recruit has been the actress Isabelle Huppert, who is playing Blanche Dubois in Un Tramway, a loose interpretation of the Ten-nessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire.

In April, the British film director Sam Mendes will make his first excursion into French theatre when he directs two Shakespeare plays in Paris, The Tempest and As You Like It.

Audrey Tautou knew that she would be given no quarter by French theatre critics if she failed to make the leap on to the stage. “Everyone is waiting for me to fall on my face, but I don’t care,” she told the newspaper Le Figaro.

The role of Nora in A Doll’s House might have been written for Tautou. In her cinema career, she has progressed from her early roles as a lovable, naive, fragile and comical young woman (such as Amélie). She made a much-praised appearance last year as a tortured and not always likeable Coco Chanel in a movie about the fashion designer’s early life. For her performance in Coco Avant Chanel (Coco before Chanel), Tautou has been nominated for a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar.

In A Doll’s House (written in 1879), her character, Nora, makes a similar progression from a childlike wife, patronised by her husband, to a tortured and would-be liberated adult woman. The production at the Théâtre de la Madeleine until 10 June, directed by Michel Fau, is played for laughs in the first half – somewhat unusually but with great success.

Source: The indipendent

Audrey is nominates as Best Actress, and Coco Before Chanel as Best Film not in english Language!!!

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

BROKEN EMBRACES – Agustín Almodóvar, Pedro Almodóvar
COCO BEFORE CHANEL – Carole Scotta, Caroline Benjo, Philippe Carcassonne, Anne Fontaine
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN – Carl Molinder, John Nordling, Tomas Alfredson
A PROPHET – Pascal Caucheteux, Marco Cherqui, Alix Raynaud, Jacques Audiard
THE WHITE RIBBON – Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Menegoz, Michael Haneke

LEADING ACTRESS

CAREY MULLIGAN – An Education
SAOIRSE RONAN – The Lovely Bones
GABOUREY SIDIBE – Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
MERYL STREEP – Julie & Julia
AUDREY TAUTOU – Coco Before Chanel

Thanks to melfan for the heads up!
Source: BAFTA OFFICIAL SITE

In Anne Fontaine’s admiring but not uncritical “Coco Before Chanel,” Audrey Tautou plays an iconic designer who was also a kind of philosopher.

She wanted to liberate women from their crushing corsets, peel away their suffocating veils and let them move freely. In the process, she designed an adventurous life for herself.

Although sumptuously produced, the film is a staid account of her early years. We meet Gabrielle Chanel as her father dumps her at an orphanage with hardly a backward glance. The nuns’ black habits make an impression on the aspiring seamstress but don’t influence her adolescent wardrobe choices. Performing a saloon cabaret act with her sister, “Coco” dresses in French can-can froufrou.

Fontaine films with a romantic eye and moments of inspiration. In a ballroom scene, women in stuffy formal attire swirl and part until Tautou is revealed dancing in an evening gown of elegant simplicity. At that moment you can appreciate how radical her vision was.

Tautou makes Chanel crafty, sometimes unsympathetic, but always restlessly intelligent. But the film glosses over her complex, sometimes unpleasant personality, and skips the heart of the story: her growth from a designer of hats to a visionary entrepreneur.

“Coco Before Chanel” is exquisite on the surface but barely peeks behind the seams.

Source: theday.com