Annie Girardot

The film that turned Annie Girardot into a star in Europe was, by one Criterion account, Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, and the same sentence counts Jean Delannoy's Maigret Sets a Trap, from two years earlier, among her first roles, where she plays a woman of mystery. Forty years later she took the mother of Isabelle Huppert's Erika in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, drawn from Elfriede Jelinek's novel. On Moira Weigel's reading her voice arrives as a rasp that imitates ease while standing a finger's width from violent anger; the mother picks at her daughter's purchases without pause and keeps returning to the money they are saving for a flat of their own. She holds three Césars: best actress in 1977 for Docteur Françoise Gailland, and supporting actress in 1996 for Les Misérables and in 2002 for The Piano Teacher.