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Home , Marion Cotillard

MAGNIFIQUE MARION Known for roles that push her to the limit, Marion Cotillard’s latest film has her looking chic in jade satin while mowing down Nazis. Jane Cornwell meets the French actor in to talk movies, life and that relationship with co-star .

sl • 10 have a need, a desire, to What with Jolie and Pitt falling for "e last time she thoroughly experience depth,” says Marion each other on the set of the 2005 spy “BRAD IS A rehearsed for a !lm was for . Cotillard, !xing me with her !lm Mr and Mrs Smith while Pitt was Cotillard took on the famous role, expressive doe eyes as she sits, still married to Jennifer Aniston, the MAN WHO opposite , after a cross-legged, in an armchair rumour mill couldn’t help but confuse telephone conversation with maverick in a luxury hotel in central art and life a second time around. IS EASY TO Australian director Justin Kerzel, who Paris. “And my way of doing that is Still, talk of Pitt and Cotillard’s was following up the acclaimed especially dramatic.” immediate connection – professionally CONNECT Snowtown. (She worked with both men i"e French star, 41, has a penchant for speaking – on meeting for rehearsals again on the upcoming big-budget video extreme acting. Or at least, for choosing (“"eir chemistry was electric,” producer WITH. HIS game adaptation, Assassin’s Creed.) roles that push her to her limits. "ere Graham King told People) lit a spark. Impressed by Kerzel’s vision (“I felt in was the double amputee in “Allied is the story of two spies who his voice he was a true artist, and when I in 2012. "e Polish refugee coerced into have to pretend they are a husband and LIFE IS met him I was right”), Cotillard plunged prostitution in !e Immigrant in 2013. wife, and are given an almost suicidal deep into ’s dark interior. Her Lady Macbeth in 2015’s Macbeth, mission to kill a German ambassador,” OBVIOUSLY “Several times I have been surprised mad with grief and vengeance in a hail- says Cotillard in her lilting, American- at how I can let go and channel blasted winter landscape, unleashing accented English. VERY something strong, something that all sorts of horror after convincing her “"ey fall in love for real, which isn’t about me,” she says. husband to murder the king. "en there doesn’t make their lives easy.” SPECIAL “"ere’s no ego involved. I’m like was her heartbreaking portrayal of Edith Not easy at all: when Pitt’s character, a witness. Even in my life I’ve had Piaf in the 2007 biopic , US intelligence o%cer Max Vatan, is BUT HE surprising experiences that make a role that won her the Best Actress told that his wife, me think we humans are amazing Oscar, the !rst ever for a performance !ghter Marianne Beausejour, may be IS VERY machines, and if we were just willing in French, and which transformed her German spy, he is given the task of to explore the possibilities we could into an international movie icon. executing her if it proves to be the case. CONNECTED be so much more powerful.” Little wonder: eyebrows and hairline Clever and entertaining – as one But getting inside a character is one shaved, Cotillard bent her willowy might expect from the director of Forrest TO THIS thing. Letting that character go is 170-centimetre frame into Piaf’s Gump – Allied is a slice of old-school another. "is wasn’t a problem with love- 147-centimetre body and acted her guts Hollywood movie making, with the WORLD.” interest parts in blockbusters such as !e out as a lovelorn cabaret singer with a perfectly coi$ed Cotillard a vision in Dark Knight Rises (in which she played morphine addiction. "e performance bias-cut jade satin even when she and a opposite Batman) or ’s had an awestruck tuxedoed Pitt are gunning down Nazis romantic comedy . declaring her a “genius”. at a banquet. Less extreme acting, But Lady Macbeth and Piaf didn’t Today, clad in a #owing patterned perhaps, than artful make-believe. want to leave. Especially Piaf, whose silk dress, her stiletto heels kicked o$ Asked about her much-touted presence haunted her throughout post- onto the shagpile, Cotillard seems connection with Pitt, Cotillard pauses, La Vie En Rose holidays to Tahiti and remarkably laid-back for a mother of one her glassy eyes alert, scanning me for Peru until – ping! – Cotillard realised (Marcel, 5) with four !lms out this year a hidden agenda. that, having been abandoned as a child, – including Allied, the Robert Zemickis- “He is a man who is easy to connect Piaf’s greatest fear was to be alone. directed World War II drama we’re here with,” she says. “His life is obviously “Now this is like the ultimate to discuss. Not to mention her ongoing very special but he is very connected to understanding I have of a character, role as a model/performer/muse for this world, sometimes more than people the getting out,” she says. French fashion house Christian , who don’t have his life.” “I never know what form it will take and as an eco-activist for campaigning She #ashes a smile. “He is a very good but it takes less time because I am aware organisations including . man, very generous and open. We had of the process and that I have to ignite Oh, and she’s pregnant. Cotillard, the chance to rehearse for 15 days before it, which is pretty cool.” who is sipping green tea, a wrapper from we began !lming, which is unusual, and a protein ball on the table next to her, which I loved,” she continues. “It means A self-described “outcast” and “teenage doesn’t actually tell me this. Along with that when you arrive on set you have this weirdo”, Cotillard grew up in a bobo the rest of the world, I !nd out two weeks connection and trust.” (bourgeois bohemian) household on the later, when frenzied media conjecture Most directors prefer to keep things 18th #oor of a tower block in the forces the actress to issue a statement on fresh, she says. "en there are those Parisian suburbs, the eldest of three Instagram both denying involvement in with particularly idiosyncratic methods: children born to thespian parents. Her the forthcoming divorce of Angelina for her Oscar-nominated role as a sacked mother was a theatre actress, her father Jolie and Brad Pitt, her co-star in Allied, and depressed factory worker in 2014’s a mime artist and theatre director. and announcing her pregnancy. Two Days, One Night, Belgian auteurs Acting started early: “I have a vivid “"is is going to be my !rst and only Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes got her memory of being onstage with my mum reaction to the whirlwind news that doing 82 extended takes for one scene. at the age of four and kneeling next to broke 24 hours ago,” wrote Cotillard. “We went into the most trivial details, this other actress and the director saying, “Many years ago I met the man of my going beyond the work, beyond acting,” ‘"is is your mother, she is dead.’ ” life [actor/director ], says Cotillard, for whom authenticity A grin. “And I was so confused, the father of my son and the baby we are and connection, her buzzword, is telling the guy, ‘No! My mum is over expecting. He is my love, my best friend, everything. “"ey pushed me there, and there!’ I remember hiding under a piano Photography by Getty by Photography the only one that I need.” I was so happy to go there with them.” and thinking everybody was crazy.”

sl • 11 Clockwise from far left: Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose; with Macbeth co-star Michael Fassbender at Cannes, 2015; in a cage in Paris for a 2013 Greenpeace protest; with co-star Brad Pitt in Allied; with partner Guillaime Canet.

She went on to study drama at the double take, and lets minority voices be Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique in heard. As an ambassador for Greenpeace, Orléans in the Loire Valley, 130 she has done everything from travelling kilometres south of Paris, where her to the Congo to make a series of !lms family had moved in the 1990s to live about the destruction of the rainforests close to the land. By 18 she was landing by logging companies to, in November small parts on French TV; her 2013, literally caging herself outside breakthrough came in 1998 with an the in protest at the arrest ongoing role in Luc Besson’s action two months earlier of Greenpeace comedy franchise . activists – the “Arctic 30” – in Russia. Aged 27, she was hankering for the Censure doesn’t bother her: sort of chunky roles found in !lms by “Celebrities, let’s call us that, will American directors Francis Ford always be criticised, especially if Coppola, and Martin we mix things. But the material Scorsese, but feeling stuck. for any artist – painter, writer, singer, Considering chucking in acting to actor – is the world and its people; we work for Greenpeace and maybe pursue bear witness and we give a testimony. “FEAR IS RISING, AND music – she’s a talented singer and “At one point I thought I better SOME POLITICIANS multi-instrumentalist – she landed a shut up as I thought I was being TAKE ADVANTAGE part in ’s and counterproductive. "en I got an email headed to America. She went on to saying how happy they were because OF THIS. BUT play the love interest in ’s my name got them heard faster, and EVEN IF WE CLAIM , opposite . I thought, ‘Okay, f… the critics.’ ” THAT, AFTER THE “I haven’t met many Australians,” she Everything she does, she says, from BATACLAN, NICE AND says when I ask, “but the ones I have her acting to her philanthropy to the met all seem to have a kindness which I way she lives her life, is connected to her ALL THE ATTACKS, assume is a very common thing? I’m not need to understand human beings, to try WE DON’T LIVE just saying this,” she adds. “If it was the to !gure out how we function. WITH FEAR, IT IS opposite I wouldn’t mention it.” “I’m much more zen than my Kindness matters to Cotillard. characters but I’m still…” A STRUGGLE.” Kindness, depth, connection. We talk Another pause. about the tragic events in France of the Deep? past two years. How much has her Cotillard #ashes a smile. “Oui,” she country changed? says. “Deep will do.” • “Of course things feel di$erent because fear is rising, and some politicians take advantage of this. But THREE FACTS: even if we claim that, after the Bataclan, MARION COTILLARD Nice and all the attacks, we don’t live with fear, it is a struggle.” She used to be the bass player and vocalist in her singer/composer friend She pauses. “I personally don’t live Yodelice’s band. Cotillard hid behind with fear. I’m very much connected her alter ego Simone, her gran’s name: to present times and don’t let my “It was good to have the spotlight on mental …” – she searches for a word, someone else.” lets it go – “manipulate my thoughts. “It is so important to be connected She’s passionate about organic to people who spread wisdom,” she food and is a committed locavore; continues, “because wisdom is the only wherever possible she likes to eat food way to !ght this ignorance and fear. grown within a 170-kilometre radius of her location. “"e only thing that can bring us together and create a connection that will last will be a big positive shock, An avid reader, Cotillard’s all-time not a negative thing.” favourite author is Lithuanian-born Such as? Cotillard is silent before Frenchman, Romain Gary (1914-80): “His writing is so beautiful. If I lived issuing a low whistle and turning up her in his era I would have done anything palms. What she does know, however, to meet him, which I think is what is that attaching her celebrity status to his wife [French-American actress] environmental causes makes people Jean Seberg did.”

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