Taxi (1998)
Cotillard only has a few scenes as the girlfriend of Marseilles cab driver Samy Naceri, but their chemistry is terrific, and the film’s massive success made the actress an overnight star.
Cotillard only has a few scenes as the girlfriend of Marseilles cab driver Samy Naceri, but their chemistry is terrific, and the film’s massive success made the actress an overnight star.
She excels in this early lead role as both a free-spirited singer-model and her dour, introverted twin sister. When the former commits suicide, the latter assumes her identity.
Cotillard handily stole this handsome WWI melodrama right out from under its ostensible star, Audrey Tautou, and won a supporting actress Cesar (French Oscar) in the process.
She stunned international audiences, and also won a well-deserved actress Oscar, for her extraordinary physical and emotional embodiment of the brilliant but tragic singer Edith Piaf.
Cotillard was an oasis of real feeling as the long-suffering wife of a movie director played by Daniel Day-Lewis in this otherwise undercooked and overstylized musical version of Fellini’s “8 1/2.”
More than holding her own opposite Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger, Cotillard’s Billie Frechette was the tough yet tender emotional center of Michael Mann’s exciting gangland tale.
Cotillard made for an exemplary femme fatale as the suicidal wife Leonardo DiCaprio just can’t get out of his head in Christopher Nolan’s visionary mind-trip thriller.
She was at her loveliest
as the Picasso muse who finds herself falling for Owen Wilson’s
time-traveling writer in Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning fable.
In her second teaming with Nolan (and her “Public Enemies” co-star Christian Bale), Cotillard was marvelously duplicitous as an eco-friendly philanthropist with a dark secret.
Special effects helped transform Cotillard into the legless whale trainer of Jacques Audiard’s powerful romantic drama, but the movie’s most special effect was clearly the actress herself.