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Sabine Azéma - Actress
Sabine Azéma
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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 on 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.