40 years old, 25 years of career, dozens of film roles and a César for best female hope for her role in “I’m fine, don’t worry about it” (2006), thus could sum up the life of Mélanie Laurent . To go into detail, here are five anecdotes that you (perhaps) did not know about the actress.
A family of artists
Mélanie Laurent grew up in a family of artists. His mother, Annick, is a dance teacher, while his father Pierre Laurent is a dubbing actor. He notably lent his voice to Ned Flanders and twenty other characters from the series “The Simpsons”. His maternal grandparents evolved in the middle of the theater. She was thus destined to become an artist and dreamed of being an actress. “Little, I wanted to be Catherine Deneuve”, she confided in an interview with “Nice Matin” in 2022.
A famous mentor
While accompanying a friend to the casting of “Asterix and Obelix against Caesar” (1999), Mélanie Laurent was noticed by Gérard Depardieu. Just that. “Do you want to make movies? he asked her, before giving her three pieces of advice: don’t take acting lessons, don’t learn your text too much in advance and don’t be afraid of ridicule.
Any advice she followed? “I never took acting lessons and maybe it was a mistake”, she slipped on the set of “C à vous”, in 2018. ““Don’t learn your text ”, it’s very dangerous, I put myself in danger many times. And on the other hand, “don’t be afraid of ridicule”, I really discovered what this sentence meant afterwards. In 1999, it was Gérard Depardieu who offered Mélanie Laurent her first film role in “A bridge between two shores”. What to launch his career.
A failed album
Mélanie Laurent tried her hand at music. In 2011, she released an album entitled “En t’attendant”, produced by her partner at the time, musician Damien Rice. An album that did not (at all) meet its audience: it only sold 7200 copies. And she hasn’t repeated the experience… yet.
“At the time, I had a great facility to write lyrics in the song format. It came. Later, every time I tried again, it wouldn’t come. On the one hand, it frustrates me a little because I really liked this way of sharing stories, something real, direct, with a possible audience. On the other hand, I was so nervous on stage that I hardly got any pleasure from it, it was even a pain. We’ll see…”, she confided in an interview with “Current Woman” in 2021.
A daring lie
In addition to her career in France, Mélanie Laurent has multiplied roles in international productions such as “A night train for Lisbon” (2013), with Jake Gyllenhaal, or “Insaisissables” (2013), with Mark Ruffalo and Jesse Eisenberg. She mainly played in “Inglorious Basterds” (2009), by Quentin Tarantino. Role she got thanks to a lie. The director was looking for a perfectly bilingual French-English actress, and she assured that it was the case. Before playing Shosanna, she took accelerated English lessons.
An erotic series
For the past ten years, Mélanie Laurent has not only been an actress. She is also a director. This mother of two has made five feature films, including “Le Bal des Folles” (2021), and a documentary: “Tomorrow” (2015). She started in 2008 with a short film and an episode of “X femmes”, an erotic anthology series. In her episode, entitled “At her feet”, she stages the fascination of a man for an unknown woman, with actors from X cinema like Lou Charmelle.
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