Biographie

Most nominated actress for the César Award. As of 2022, she has been nominated 16 times, and won Best Actress twice, for La cérémonie (1995) and for Elle (2016). She has 14 nominations for Best Actress and 2 nominations for Best Supporting Actress.

She was Michael Haneke's first choice for the role of Anna in Funny Games (1997), but she declined the offer because she was scared to do it. The role went to Susanne Lothar instead.

Michael Haneke is her favorite director to work with.

For her performance in Elle (2016), she's one of only 3 actresses to have won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama for a foreign language film, the other two being Anouk Aimée in Un homme et une femme (1966) and Liv Ullmann in Utvandrarna (1971).

In the early '70s, Huppert shared an apartment with Isabelle Adjani and the late actress Christine Pascal.

Acting is a way of living out one's insanity.

A script, even it differs from filmmaker to filmmaker, never tells the whole story; there are always elements that need to be invented. As soon as one decides to take a role after having read the script, the various elements begin to fall into place. A character begins to take shape. And regardless of whether the information given is ample or not, it appears to one, strangely, as an apparition. From that moment, one knows whether or not this figure will be able to pass through one; if there is a meeting point.

Body language in the cinema is thus very particular. The screen can transmit an image very different of the body. In life, we see each other by facing each other. In the cinema, one is astonished to discover oneself from another angle. But at the same time there is no obligation to look. Serge Daney used to say that the work of actors is the make movies, and the work of the spectator is to look at them.

I think being actor is more difficult for men. The very best actors are not afraid of playing with their own femininity and leaving aside power struggles with the director. Because there's no getting around it: on a film set, it's the director who has the power. This fact is often more difficult to accept for an actor than for an actress.

I don't know if you ever say to yourself that you want to be an actress. It eventually becomes a social function - you are an actress and you make a living out of it, but at the beginning it's more a matter of how to survive, or how to exist in a certain way. I think being an actress is more how to cope with the fact that you can't do anything else than to express a talent. It's a way of being untalented for anything. To say, "I want to be an actress" is to say, "I can't do anything else, so let's try to be an actress.