Irène Jacob

Irène Jacob's place in cinema was made by two films with Krzysztof Kieślowski. In The Double Life of Véronique she carries two parts at once, the Polish Weronika and the French Véronique. Peter Cowie, writing for the Criterion Collection, calls the performance a flawless clarity that comes of complete trust in her director, and says what separates the two women is a matter of small gestures: a shoelace twirled absently, a laugh to herself over a fairy tale, one extra blink. By the same account Kieślowski became a father figure to an actress who at that point had almost nothing behind her beyond a small part in one film. Their second film together was Three Colors: Red, from 1994.