Juliette Binoche (French pronunciation: ; born 9 March 1964) is a French actress and dancer.
She has appeared in more than sixty feature films and has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Silver Bear, a Cannes Film Festival Award, Volpi Cup and a César Award.
Binoche began taking acting lessons during adolescence and, after performing in several stage productions, was cast in different films.
During the 2000s, she maintained an international career, alternating between French and English language roles in both mainstream and art-house productions. In 2010, she won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, making her the first actress to win the European "Best Actress Triple Crown" (for winning awards at the Berlin, Cannes, and Venice film festivals).
Throughout her career, Binoche has intermittently appeared on stage, most notably in a 1998 London production of Luigi Pirandello's Naked and in a 2000 production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal on Broadway for which she was nominated for a Tony Award. In 2008, she began a world tour with a modern dance production in-i devised in collaboration with Akram Khan.
Early life
Binoche was born in Paris, the daughter of Jean-Marie Binoche, a director, actor, and sculptor, and Monique Yvette Stalens (born 1939), a teacher, director, and actress. Her father, who is French, also has one eighth Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry; he was raised partly in Morocco by his French-born parents. Her mother was born in Częstochowa, Poland. Binoche's maternal grandfather, Andre Stalens, was born in Poland, of Belgian (Walloon) and French descent, and Binoche's maternal grandmother, Julia Helena Młynarczyk, was of Polish origin. Both of them were actors who were born in Częstochowa; the German Nazi occupiers imprisoned them at Auschwitz as intellectuals.
When Binoche's parents divorced in 1968, four-year-old Juliette and her sister Marion were sent to a provincial boarding school. During their teens, the Binoche sisters spent their school holidays with their maternal grandmother, not seeing their parents for months at a time. Binoche has stated that this perceived parental abandonment had a profound effect on her.
She was not particularly academic and in her teenage years began acting at school in amateur stage productions. At seventeen, she directed and starred in a student production of the Eugène Ionesco play, Exit the King. She studied acting at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique (CNSAD), but quit after a short time as she disliked the curriculum. In the early 1980s, she found an agent through a friend and joined a theater troupe, touring France, Belgium and Switzerland under the pseudonym "Juliette Adrienne". Around this time, she began lessons with acting coach Vera Gregh.
Her first professional screen experience came as an extra in the three-part TF1 television series Dorothée, danseuse de corde (1983) directed by Jacques Fansten, followed by a similarly small role in the provincial television film Fort bloque directed by Pierrick Guinnard. After this, Binoche secured her first feature-film appearance with a minor role in Pascal Kané's Liberty Belle (1983). Her role required just two days on-set, but was enough to inspire Binoche to pursue a career in film.
