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Learn 50 facts you missed about French actress Juliette Binoche.
1. Juliette Binoche is a French actress.
2. Besides her acting career she is also an artist and dancer.
3. She has appeared in more than 40 feature films.
4. She has been recipient of numerous international awards.
5. She came from an artistic background.
6. She began taking acting lessons during adolescence.
7. Director André Téchiné made her a star in France with the leading role in his 1985 drama Rendez-vous.
8. Her English-language debut was in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Philip Kaufman, launched her international career.
9. She declined a role in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park choosing instead to join Krzysztof Kieślowski in Three Colors: Blue.
10. For her performance in Three Colors: Blue she won the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Actress and a César.
11. Three years later Binoche gained further acclaim in Anthony Minghella's The English Patient.
12. She was awarded an Academy Award and a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress in addition to the Best Actress Award at the 1997 Berlin International Film Festival for the role in The English Patient.
13. For her performance in Lasse Hallström's romantic comedy Chocolat, Binoche was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
14. In 2010, she won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy making her the first actress to win the European "Best Actress Triple Crown".
15. Throughout her career Binoche has intermittently appeared on stage, most notably in a 1998 London production of Luigi Pirandello's Naked and in a 2000 production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal on Broadway.
16. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her stage role in Naked.
17. In 2008 she began a world tour with a modern dance production in-i devised in collaboration with Akram Khan.
18. Her other notable performances include: Mauvais Sang, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Damage, The Horseman on the Roof, Code Unknown, Caché, Breaking and Entering, Flight of the Red Balloon and Camille Claudel 1915.
19. Binoche was born in Paris.
20. Her father Jean-Marie Binoche is a director, actor, and sculptor.
21. Her mother Monique Yvette Stalens is a teacher, director, and actress.
22. Her father, who is French, also has one eighth Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry.
23. Her father was raised partly in Morocco by his French-born parents.
24. Juliette's mother was born in Częstochowa, Poland.
25. Binoche's maternal grandfather, Andre Stalens, was born in Poland, of Belgian (Walloon) and French descent.
26. Binoche's maternal grandmother, Julia Helena Młynarczyk, was of Polish origin.
27. She has a sister Marion.
28. She also has a half-brother Camille Humeau.
29. When Binoche's parents divorced in 1968, four-year-old Binoche and her sister Marion were sent to a provincial boarding school.
30. During their teens, the Binoche sisters spent their school holidays with their maternal grandmother, not seeing either parent for months at a time.
31. Binoche has stated that this perceived parental abandonment had a profound effect on her.
32. In her teenage years she began acting at school in amateur stage productions.
33. At 17, she directed and starred in a student production of the Eugène Ionesco play, Exit the King.
34. She studied acting at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique (CNSAD), but quit after a short time as she disliked the curriculum.
35. In the early 1980s, she found an agent through a friend and joined a theater troupe with which she toured France, Belgium and Switzerland under the pseudonym "Juliette Adrienne".
36. Binoche has two children: a son Raphaël and a daughter Hana.
37. Her sister, Marion Stalens is a professional photographer as well as a director of documentary films.
38. Her half-brother Camille Humeau is an acclaimed musician.
39. Stage director Pierre Pradinas is married to her sister Marion
40. Since 1992 Binoche is a patron of the French Cambodian charity Enfants d'Asie (previously ASPECA).
41. Through Enfants d'Asie charity she is godmother to five Cambodian orphans.
42. Through the charity Enfants d'Asie she has funded the construction of a children's home in Battambang.
43. Starting in 2000, Juliette Binoche has been involved with the organization Reporters Without Borders.
44. In 2002, she presided over "Photos of Stars" with Thierry Ardisson. Nearly 100 French stars were given disposable cameras, which were then auctioned, the buyer then having the exclusive photos taken by the star developed.
45. Juliette Binoche began lessons with acting coach Vera Gregh.
46. Her first professional screen experience was as an extra in the three part TF1 television series Dorothée, danseuse de corde directed by Jacques Fensten, which was followed by a similarly small role in the provincial television film Fort bloque directed by Pierrick Guinnard.
47. Binoche secured her first feature film appearance with a minor role in Pascal Kané's Liberty Belle. Her role required just two days on set, but was enough to inspire Binoche to pursue a career in film.
48. In April 2002, Binoche and several other French stars including Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Kassovitz attended a "protest picnic" to object to the firing of Canal+ chairman Pierre Lescure by the Vivendi Universal company.
49. On 7 February 2006, Binoche attended a high profile demonstration organised by Reporters Without Borders in support of Jill Carroll and two Iraqi journalists who had been abducted in Baghdad.
50. Binoche narrated the new documentary film titled Talking about Rose about the Chad soldier Rose Lokissim who fought against Hissène Habré's dictatorship in the 1980s.
Source: Wikipedia.org
