Isabelle Adjani
Isabelle Yasmine Adjani (born 27 June 1955) is a French actress and singer of Algerian and German descent.
Isabelle Adjani
She is the only performer to win five César Awards for acting—all in the Best Actress category—for Possession (1981), One Deadly Summer (1983), Camille Claudel (1988), La Reine Margot (1994), and Skirt Day (2009). She was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 2010 and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2014.
Her portrayal of Adèle Hugo in The Story of Adèle H. (1975) earned Adjani her first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, which made her, at 20, the youngest nominee in that category at the time. Her second Best Actress nomination came in 1990 for portraying Camille Claudel, making her the first French actress to receive two Academy Award nominations for foreign-language films. She won the Cannes Film Festival Award for her performances in Possession and Quartet (1981), becoming the only actress to win for two films in the same competition slate, and a Berlin Silver Bear for Camille Claudel.
Her other notable film roles include The Slap (1974), The Tenant (1975), Barocco (1976), The Driver (1978), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), All Fired Up (1982), Subway (1985), Ishtar (1987), Diabolique (1996), Adolphe (2002), Bon voyage (2003), French Women (2014), The World Is Yours (2018) and Peter von Kant (2022).
Early life and education[edit]
Isabelle Yasmine Adjani was born on 27 June 1955 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, to Mohammed Cherif Adjani, an Algerian Muslim from Constantine, and Emma Augusta "Gusti" Schweinberger, a German Catholic from Bavaria.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
Adjani's parents met near the end of World War II, when her father was in the French Army. They married and her mother returned with him to Paris, despite not speaking a word of French.[8][9] She asked him to take Cherif as his first name as she thought it sounded more "American".[10]
Isabelle grew up bilingual, speaking French and German fluently,[11][12][13] in Gennevilliers, a northwestern suburb of Paris, where her father worked in a garage.[14] After winning a school recitation contest, Adjani began acting by the age of 12 in amateur theater. She successfully passed her baccalauréat and was auditing classes at the University of Vincennes in 1976.[3]
Adjani had a younger brother, Éric, who was a photographer. He died on 25 December 2010, aged 53.[15][16]
Honors[edit]
In addition to specific awards for particular films, Adjani was made a Knight of France's Legion of Honour on 14 July 2010 for her contributions to the arts.[37]