Audrey Tautou

Audrey Tautou (born August 9, 1976, Beaumont, Auvergne, France) is a French actress known for her gamine beauty and elfin charm.

Tautou began her acting career with several television movies in the late 1990s and won a talent-search contest sponsored by a French media company in 1999. Later that year she appeared in her first major film role, portraying a naive salon worker in Vénus beauté (institut), which was released in the United States as Venus Beauty Institute. Tautou received a French César award as most-promising female newcomer for her performance. In 2000 she was a fixture in movie theatres, appearing in Épouse-moi (Marry Me), Voyous voyelles (Pretty Devils), Le Libertin (The Libertine), and Le Battement d’ailes du papillon (Happenstance).

Tautou’s breakthrough, however, came in 2001 with the quirky Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie), in which she starred as a lonely waitress who concocts elaborate schemes to make others happy and in the process falls in love. The romantic fable, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, was an international hit, became the top-grossing French-language movie of all time in the United States, and scored an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. It also earned Tautou a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nomination for best actress. In 2002 she appeared in the ensemble comedy L’Auberge espagnole, about foreign-exchange students. Sequels included Les Poupées russes (2005; Russian Dolls) and Casse-tête chinois (Chinese Puzzle; 2013), which followed the characters as they aged.

Tautou made her English-language debut in Dirty Pretty Things (2002). After appearing in the musical Pas sur la bouche (2003; Not on the Lips) and in Nowhere to Go but Up (2003), Tautou reteamed with Jeunet for the César award-winning Un Long Dimanche de fiançailles (2004; A Very Long Engagement), in which she played a woman searching for her lost fiancé after World War I. In 2006 Tautou starred in her first big-budget Hollywood film, The Da Vinci Code, but 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 (2006; Priceless) and Ensemble, c’est tout (2007; Hunting and Gathering). In 2009 she portrayed Coco Chanel in the biopic Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel). She evinced a widow who is drawn out of mourning by an oafish coworker in La Délicatesse (2011; Delicacy) and played the murderous title heroine in Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012; Thérèse), director Claude Miller’s adaptation of the François Mauriac novel (1927) of the same name.

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 (2013; Mood Indigo). She played the mother of a talented young artist in Gondry’s Microbe et gasoil (Microbe & Gasoline) and voiced a journalist in the animated fantasy Phantom Boy (both 2015). In 2016 Tautou appeared in L’Odyssée (The Odyssey), a biopic about Jacques Cousteau. Her later films included the family comedy Santa & Cie (2017; Christmas & Co.) and En liberte! (2018; The Trouble with You), in which she played the wife of a man wrongfully imprisoned. She played a free-spirited hairdresser in The Jesus Rolls (2019), an adaptation of Les valseuses (1974; Going Places) that was a spin-off of the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998).