Audrey Tautou

Audrey Tautou (1976) is a French actress known for her gamine beauty and elfin charm. She received critical acclaim for her feature film debut in Vénus beauté (institut)/Venus Beauty Institute (1999), and won the César Award for Most Promising Actress. She made her international breakthrough with her starring role as Amélie in the cinema hit Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amélie (2001). For that, she was nominated for a César and a BAFTA Award. Playing mainly in French films, Tautou also appeared in the British thriller Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and the American blockbuster The Da Vinci Code (2006).


British postcard by Odeon. Photo: Momentum Pictures. Audrey Tautou in Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001).


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Audrey Tautou on the English poster for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


Italian promocard by The Cult Advertising, no. PC 6390. Image: Imagine / Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures. Audrey Tautou in The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006). Caption: Audrey Tautou is Sophie. 19 May 2006, the secret will be revealed.


Swiss postcard by Frenetic. Photo: Frenetic Films. Audrey Tautou in De vrais mensonges/Beautiful Lies (Pierre Salvadori, 2010).


Swiss postcard by Frenetic.ch. Photo: Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou and Omar Sy in L'écume des jours/Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013).

Amélie

Audrey Justine Tautou was born in Beaumont, France in 1976. She was the daughter of a dental surgeon, Bernard Tautou, and a teacher, Évelyne Tautou, also a former deputy mayor of Montluçon. She spent her childhood and teenage years in Montluçon with her two sisters and brother. Audrey, reportedly named after Audrey Hepburn, discovered early in life that playing comedy suited her and she trained at Cours Florent in Paris.

She began her acting career with several television movies in the late 1990s and received the award for best young actress at the Jeune Comedien de Cinema Festival in Béziers in 1998. Tautou won a talent search contest sponsored by Canal+, a French media company in 1999.

Thanks in part to her striking appearance and girlish looks, she caught the eye of director Tonie Marshall, who gave the 22-years-old actress the role of a naive salon worker in her film Vénus Beauté (institut)/Venus Beauty Institute (Tonie Marshall, 1999). For this film, she received the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti as her country's most promising young film actress. In 2000 she was a fixture in French cinemas, appearing in Épouse-moi/Marry Me (Harriet Marin, 2000), Voyous voyelle/Pretty Devils (Serge Meynard, 2000), Le Libertin/The Libertine (Gabriel Aghion, 2000) with Vincent Pérez, and Le Battement d’ailes du papillon/Happenstance (Laurent Firtode, 2000).

The following year, she made her international breakthrough with her starring role in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). In this romantic fable, she starred as a shy and lonely waitress who concocts elaborate schemes to make others happy and in the process falls in love. Grossing over $33 million in limited theatrical release, the film became the top-grossing French-language movie of all time in the United States and scored five Oscar nominations, including one for best foreign-language film. It also earned Tautou a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nomination for best actress and a César nomination.

In 2002 she appeared opposite Romain Duris in the ensemble comedy L’Auberge espagnole/The Spanish Apartment (Cédric Klapisch, 2002) about foreign exchange students. There were two sequels, Les Poupées russes/Russian Dolls (Cédric Klapisch, 2005) and Casse-tête chinois/Chinese Puzzle (Cédric Klapisch, 2013), which followed the characters as they aged.


Chinese postcard. Photo: Momentum Pictures. Audrey Tautou in Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001).


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6148, Postcard 2 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. She cultivates a taste for small pleasures. Like skimming stones on St. Martin's Canal. And cracking crème brulée with a teaspoon.


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6149, Postcard 3 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. Some Fridays, Amelie goes to the movies. She likes looking back at people's faces in the dark. Amelie notices the shy people always laugh the loudest.


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6150, Postcard 4 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. She tries hard to fix other people's messy lives. But what about her own life? Who'll fix that?


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6152, Postcard 6 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Jamel Debbouze and Urbain Cancelier in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. But maybe her thoughts are with someone else. Someone she's known since always. Could Amelie be falling in love?

Coco Chanel

Audrey Tautou mainly acts in French films, including the musical Pas sur la bouche/Not on the Lips (Alain Resnais, 2003). Tautou reteamed with Jeunet for the César award-winning drama Un Long Dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004). In this ambitious international adaptation of Sébastien Japrisot's novel of the same name, she played a woman searching for her lost fiancé after World War I.

She made her English language debut in the British thriller Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) and later appeared in Nowhere to Go but Up (Amos Kollek, 2003). She also played agent Sophie Neveu alongside Tom Hanks in the American blockbuster The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006), an adaptation of Dan Brown's novel. In both, she speaks English.

Soon thereafter she returned to the more intimate French films that made her famous. Subsequent movies included the well-received romantic comedies Hors de prix/Priceless (Pierre Salvadori, 2006) and Ensemble, c’est tout/Hunting and Gathering (Claude Berri, 2007). In 2009 she portrayed French fashion designer Coco Chanel in the biopic Coco avant Chanel/Coco Before Chanel (Anne Fontaine, 2009). That year, Tautou was also Nicole Kidman's successor as the face of Chanel No. 5 perfume in a short film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and a photo campaign by Dominique Issermann. In 2012, Tautou was in turn succeeded by American actor Brad Pitt.

In 2010, she took to the stage to star in her first play, 'Une maison de poupée' (A Doll's House), written by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Michel Fau, it was performed at the Théâtre de la Madeleine. In the cinema, she evinced a widow who is drawn out of mourning by an oafish coworker in La Délicatesse/Delicacy (Stéphane and David Foenkinos, 2011) and played the murderous title heroine in Thérèse Desqueyroux/Thérèse (Claude Miller, 2012), an adaptation of the François Mauriac novel. Tautou’s character, a woman with a water lily growing in her lung, was the locus of Michel Gondry’s absurdist fantasy L’Écume des jours/Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013). She also played the mother of a talented young artist in Gondry’s Microbe et gasoil/Microbe & Gasoline (Michel Gondry, 2015) and voiced a journalist in the animated fantasy Phantom Boy (Jean-Loup Felicioli, Alain Gagnol, 2015).

Since 2015, she has kept a low profile. However, she incidentally appeared in films such as L’Odyssée/The Odyssey (Jérôme Salle, 2016), a biopic about Jacques Cousteau, the family comedy Santa & Cie/Christmas & Co. (Alain Chabat, 2017) and En liberte!/The Trouble with You (Pierre Salvadori, 2018), in which she played the wife of a man wrongfully imprisoned. She also played a free-spirited hairdresser in the crime comedy The Jesus Rolls (John Turturro, 2019), a remake of Les valseuses/Going Places (Bertrand Blier, 1974). She was one of the few French actresses to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in June 2004. Audrey Tautou has modelled for the likes of Montblanc and L'Oréal. Until December 2008, Audrey Tautou was the partner of rock and pop singer-songwriter Matthieu Chedid, known by the pseudonym M. In 2019, she adopted a Vietnamese baby girl.


French postcard by Sonis, noo. C. 1586. Image: Warner Brothers. Gaspard Ulliel and Audrey Tautou on the English poster for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Gaspard Ulliel and Audrey Tautou on the English poster for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Scene from Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Poster by Laurent Lufroy. Photo: Bruno Calvo. Publicity still for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Poster by Laurent Lufroy. Photo: Bruno Calvo. Audrey Tautou and Jean-Pierre Jeunet during the shooting of Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


Swiss postcard by Frenetic.ch. Photo: Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris in L'écume des jours/Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013).

Sources: Britannica, Wikipedia (Dutch, French and English) and IMDb.

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) is a French romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou. The film, written by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant, is a romanticised portrayal of life in Montmartre, Paris. The film became an international box-office hit and was awarded four Césars internationally (including for best film and best director) and received five Academy Award nominations. The music was composed by Yann Tiersen.


British postcard by Odeon. Photo: Momentum Pictures. Audrey Tautou in Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001).


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6147, Postcard 1 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Flora Guiet in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. When she is six, she retreats into her imagination. In this world, LP records are made like pancakes.

The fairy-tale-like and romantic story of a young woman

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (2001) describes the fairy-tale-like and romantic story of the young woman Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) who decides one day that she can make other people happy with little things. Amélie grows up isolated from other children because she is thought to suffer from a heart condition. Her father, a doctor, never touches her, so her heartbeat rises with enthusiasm when he does during the examination.

Amélie's mother, who is very neurotic, dies when Amélie is still a child because a Canadian woman who jumps off Notre Dame falls on top of her. Amélie's father shuts himself off even more from the world and starts building a mausoleum for his dead wife. Because she is always on her own, Amélie develops a very rich imagination.

When Amélie is older, she becomes a waitress in the Café des 2 Moulins, a small café in the Montmartre district of Paris. The owner is Suzanne, a former circus performer, and the guests are colourful. Amélie, who is 23 at the time, leads a simple life. She takes pleasure in simple things like breaking the sugar coating on crème brûlée, throwing pebbles on the Canal Saint-Martin and fantasising about how many couples in Paris are having an orgasm at that moment.

Her life changes on the day of Princess Diana's death. Through a series of events that follow her shock at the news, she discovers a small metal box behind a skirting board in her bathroom. Inside this box are memories of a boy who lived in the flat decades before Amélie. Fascinated by this, she goes in search of this now grown-up person to give him back the box.

Amélie makes an agreement with herself that if she succeeds and the person is happy, she will dedicate her life to the good things in life and helping others.


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6148, Postcard 2 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. She cultivates a taste for small pleasures. Like skimming stones on St. Martin's Canal. And cracking crème brulée with a teaspoon.


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6149, Postcard 3 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. Some Fridays, Amelie goes to the movies. She likes looking back at people's faces in the dark. Amelie notices the shy people always laugh the loudest.

Making a film without making commercial concessions

Jean-Pierre Jeunet began jotting down ideas and memories in 1974, which form the basis of Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001). The profits from Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997) enabled him to make a film without making commercial concessions.

In Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001), Jeunet reintroduces elements from the short film Foutaises (1990), especially the "il aime/il n'aime pas" (he likes/he doesn't like) fragments in the presentation of the characters. The almost constant presence of the colour combination of strong red and strong green that could already be seen in La cité des enfants perdus/The City of the Lost Children (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, 1995) returns in this film.

Jeunet says in the DVD's commentary track that the idea of the album of discarded pictures came from the French writer Michel Folco, who owns such an album. Because of intellectual property rights, Jeunet could not use this album, so he had to work with extras. The film uses computer graphics and digital post-production (digital intermediate).

Jeunet had actually written the role of Amélie for Emily Watson. In the original script, Amélie's father was an Englishman living in London. However, Emily Watson's French was not good enough and there was a time conflict due to the filming of Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001). Jeunet, therefore, rewrote the script for French actress Audrey Tautou.

Filming took place at the Café des 2 Moulins in Paris, at the Gare du Nord station, outside at the Gare de l'Est and at the Sacré-Cœur church. Since the film was financially supported by the Filmstiftung NRW, the interior shots of the film were shot at the MMC Studio Coloneum in Cologne. The German painter Michael Sowa contributed some bizarre interior details. He created the pig lamp as well as some of the paintings in Amélie's room, which can be seen in the background.

For the TV sequence that suddenly refers to Amélie's life in the subtitles ("Raymond Dufayel's attempt to interfere is unacceptable. If Amélie prefers to live in her dream world and remain an introverted young woman, that is her right. Because the right to a failed life is inviolable!"), a sequence from the second part of the four-part Soviet film epic Blockade (1974) about the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War was used. A recurring theme of Georges Delerue's film music for François Truffaut's film Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (1962) is varied several times by Yann Tiersen in his soundtrack for Amelie as the main theme.


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6150, Postcard 4 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. She tries hard to fix other people's messy lives. But what about her own life? Who'll fix that?


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6151, Postcard 5 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Mathieu Kassovitz as Nino in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. Then she meets Nino. Nino collects cement footprints. Whenever he hears a funny laugh, he tapes it.

A decision against the audience

At the 2002 Césars, Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) won Best Film, Best Director, Best Score and Best Production Design. It was also nominated in nine other categories, including Best Original Screenplay and Audrey Tautou for Best Actress in a Leading Role. At the 2001 European Film Awards, the film won in four categories: Best European Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and the Jameson Audience Award for Best Director. Audrey Tautou was also nominated for Best Actress.

The film was nominated for an Oscar in 2002 in the five categories Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound, but did not prevail in any of the categories. The film received good reviews both in France and internationally.

The film did not enter the official competition at the 2001 Cannes International Film Festival, as Gilles Jacob, who was responsible for the film selection, said he found it "uninteresting". This caused a major public debate, as the rejection was interpreted in many places as a contradiction to the great media interest in the film and as a decision "against the audience".

Jean-Pierre Jeunet reacted to the rejection by bringing forward the film's theatrical release. Amélie now ran parallel to the ongoing festival. Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) grossed 140 million US dollars worldwide, 33 million of which in the USA.


Australian postcard by AvantCard, no. 6152, Postcard 6 in a series of 6. Photo: Dendy. Audrey Tatou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Jamel Debbouze, and Urbain Cancelier in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Caption: Amelie lives in Paris and in a world of her own. But maybe her thoughts are with someone else. Someone she's known since always. Could Amelie be falling in love?

Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch and German), and IMDb.

In memory of Gaspard Ulliel (1984-2022): Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004)

On Wednesday 19 January 2022, French actor Gaspard Ulliel (1984) died in Grenoble, France. The Cesar-winning star of Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (2004) and Hannibal Rising (2007) was involved in a skiing accident in the Alps. He was only 37. In his memory, we updated our post on his best-known film, the beautiful Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004) is a French romantic war film, co-written and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou and Gaspard Ulliel. It is a fictional tale about a young woman's desperate search for her fiance who might have been killed during World War I. It was based on a novel of the same name, written by Sebastien Japrisot, first published in 1991.


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Poster by Laurent Lufroy. Photo: Bruno Calvo. Publicity still for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004) with Audrey Tautou as Mathilde.


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Poster by Laurent Lufroy. Photo: Bruno Calvo. Publicity still for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004) with Gaspard Ulliel as Manech.

Manech's Marrying Mathilde

Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (2004) tells the romantic story of Mathilde (Audrey Tautou), a young woman who relentlessly searches for her fiance Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) during World War I.

Near the Somme, five French soldiers are convicted of self-mutilation in order to escape military service. They are condemned to face near-certain death in the no man's land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle.

Mathilde, the fiancee of one of the soldiers, refuses to give up hope and begins to uncover clues as to what actually took place on the battlefield. Her task is not made any easier for her due to a bout with polio as a child. She is all the while driven by the constant reminder of what her fiance had carved into one of the bells of the church near their home, MMM for Manech's Marrying Mathilde (actually in French: Manech aime Mathilde = Manech Loves Mathilde).

With the help of a private investigator, she attempts to find out what happened to her fiance. Along the way, she discovers the brutally corrupt system used by the French government to deal with those who tried to escape the front. She also discovers the stories of the other men who were sentenced to the no man's land as a punishment.

The story is told both from the point of view of the fiancee in Paris and the French countryside—mostly Brittany—of the 1920s, and through flashbacks to the battlefield.

Eventually, Mathilde finds out her fiance is alive, but he suffers from amnesia. He fails to identify even his adoptive mother. Seeing Mathilde, Manech seems to be oblivious of her. However, he still expresses concern for her when he notices her polio-stricken legs, asking her "does it hurt when you walk ?" as he did when they first met. At this, Mathilde sits on the garden chair silently watching Manech with tears in her eyes and a smile on her lips.


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Poster by Laurent Lufroy. Photo: Bruno Calvo. Publicity still for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004) with Jean-Paul Rouve as the mailman.


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Gaspard Ulliel and Audrey Tautou in Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Audrey Tautou on the English poster for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).

A visual tour de force

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet had a surprise smash with Amélie (2001), featuring the expressive Audrey Tautou as a whimsical and charming girl-woman in search of love. In his follow-up film, Un long dimanche de fiancailles, Jeunet crafted a moving, often penetrating drama, set during the darkest days of World War I and its immediate aftermath.

Audrey Tautou returned and plays pretty but frail Mathilde, a loner separated from her peers by her disability. She becomes closest friends with Maneche (Gaspard Ulliel), the son of a lighthouse keeper. Late adolescence brings love and lust, commitment, and an engagement. And when Maneche does not return from the war, Mathilde searches fervently for him, steely faithful in a moving and believable way.

Ralph Michael Stein at IMDb: "her search takes her to cities and battlefields. With resort to a child's employment of magical thinking, she frequently whispers tests about what will happen in immediate, ordinary circumstances with one result 'proving' for her that Manech is still alive. Tautou makes this self-deception appealing and infinitely sad."

At AllMovie, Derek Armstrong reviews: "Jean-Pierre Jeunet's most sophisticated achievement to date, if not actually his best film, A Very Long Engagement marks the first instance of the director's trademark techniques applied to a story of historical consequence. In addition to possessing Jeunet's usual busy narration and array of interconnected characters, it's also a visual tour de force."

Un long dimanche de fiancailles was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction and the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the Oscars. The film received five Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscar. Marion Cotillard won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress and Gaspard Ulliel the César for Most Promising Actor.


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Scene from Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


French postcard by Sonis, noo. C. 1586. Image: Warner Brothers. Gaspard Ulliel and Audrey Tautou on the English poster for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004).


French postcard by Warner Bros, France / Tapioca Films / TF1 Films Production. Poster by Laurent Lufroy. Photo: Bruno Calvo. Publicity still for Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004). Audrey Tautou and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet at the set.


Trailer. Source: Geschiedenis Beleven (YouTube).

Sources: Derek Armstrong (AllMovie), Ralph Michael Stein (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.