Over the course of a five-decade career, she starred in nearly 150
films. She is a three-time César Award winner (1977, 1996, 2002), a
two-time Molière Award winner, a BAFTA nominee, and a recipient of
several international prizes including the Volpi Cup (Best actress) at
the 1965 Venice Film Festival for Three Rooms in Manhattan.
Born in 1931, she was raised by her single mother, a midwife from
Normandy. After studying to become a midwife like her mother, she
enrolled at the prestigious Conservatoire de la rue Blanche in Paris.
After graduating in 1954 with the "First Prize in Modern and Classical
Comedy", she joined the Comédie Française, where she was a resident
actor from 1954-57.
In 1955, she began her film career, making her film debut in Treize à table (1955), but it was with theatre that she started to attract the
attention of critics. Her performance in Jean Cocteau's play La Machine
à écrire in 1956 was admired by the author who called her "The finest
dramatic temperament of the Postwar period"
In 1956 she was awarded the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti as best
up-and-coming young actress but only with Luchino Visconti's epic Rocco und seine Brüder (1960), she was able to draw the public's attention to
her. In 1962, she married Italian actor Renato Salvatori. Travelling
back and forth between two film careers in France and Italy, Girardot
also worked with renown Italian directors, including Marco Ferreri in
the scandalous La donna scimmia (1964).
Famously ignored by French New Wave directors (with the exception of
Claude Lelouch), Girardot found her glory in popular cinema alongside
more established and traditional directors such as Jean Delannoy,
Michel Boisrond, André Cayatte, Gilles Grangier, or André Hunebelle.
By the end of the 1960s, she had become a movie star and a box-office
magnet in France with such films as Laster und Tugend (1963); Lebe das Leben (1967); Der Mann, der mir gefällt (1969); and Death of
Love (1970), the fact-based tale of a middle-aged teacher whose affair
with a much younger student made her the object of bourgeoisie
ridicule. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe, and remains
Girardot's biggest box office hit in France.
Throughout the 1970s, Girardot came back and forth between drama and
comedy, proving herself an adept comedienne in such successful comedies
as Claude Zidi's Der Querkopf (1978), Michel Audiard's _Elle boit pas, elle fume pas, elle drague pas, mais... elle cause! (1970)_ and Philippe de Broca's Ein verrücktes Huhn (1977). She
also played the mother of upcoming stars like Isabelle Adjani in the
hit teen movie Die Ohrfeige (1974), and Isabelle Huppert in the drama Dr. med. Françoise Gailland (1976).
The 1980s were less kind, as her film career floundered and parts
dwindled. However, Girardot had a major comeback on the big screen
playing a peasant wife in Claude Lelouch's Les Misérables (1995).
