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Marion Cotillard is the great silent film actress of our time. True, she has yet to make a silent film and may never actually do so, but let's not get hung up on technicalities. Her power on screen has less to do with what she says than how she looks – not in terms of her appearance, but in the way those teacup-sized eyes seem to drink up the world around her, collecting an entire film's worth of feeling into a single gaze or glance.
Her contemporaries are Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, but her peers are Pola Negri, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. When Cotillard falls silent, a cinema soon follows suit.
Her very best scene in La Vie en Rose, the Edith Piaf biopic that won her a Best Actress Oscar (the only one awarded to date for a French-speaking role), a Golden Globe, a Bafta and a Cesar, wasn't the big performance of Non, je ne regrette rien at the Paris Olympia in the film's final curtain, but a smaller sequence in a New York concert hall, in which you don't hear the actress say or sing a single word.
As Piaf walks on stage, the sound drops away to a tinkling piano melody, leaving the vocal track mute. When she opens her mouth, you watch her feeling every line in her bones, reaching out and wrenching the song from the air, so convincingly you swear you can hear every absent note. Cotillard's vocal performances in La Vie en Rose were lip-synched to recordings of Piaf herself, so the film never sounds less than authentic. It's only here, when that legendary voice vanishes completely, that you realise Cotillard is making you see the music.
In the film, Cotillard is angular and eccentric; a twitchy tessellation of knees and fingers. The French actress has a tragic clown quality that reminds you of Giulietta Masina in Frederico Fellini's La Strada. The real-life Cotillard is so different from the version of her we see on screen that she could almost be her younger, shyer sister, or perhaps a work-experience Cotillard-in-training. When we meet in the Ham Yard Hotel in the West End of London, she is barefoot, sitting cross-legged on a sofa, quiet and small, with a smile as soft as butter.
She is dressed so stylishly it's hard to say exactly what she's wearing: the main garment, a structured, conical cream thing with neat black trim, is a three-way blend of duvet, poncho and tipi, and she holds it around herself like a child snuggling into a quilt. She just turned 39, but looks 24.
Cotillard is in town for the premiere of her new film, Two Days, One Night, in which she plays Sandra, a woman who spends a frantic weekend begging, wheedling and cajoling her co-workers to save her from the sack. Management had presented them with the choice of either her continued employment or their annual bonus, and they opted for the latter. She spends a Saturday and Sunday visiting them in turn, making her case, appealing to their sense of solidarity. The movie beat 11 others to win the Sydney Film Festival's Official Competition in June.
In a sense, the role is exactly what we've come to expect from her. Sandra is fighting for survival but also for her dignity, which, for Cotillard heroines, is often one and the same thing. When I point out the link, she seems first confused then surprised, as if it had never occurred to her.
"I suppose, if I think about it, it's true," she says, looking momentarily to one side. "All of the characters I've had the chance to create are survivors. But we live in a world where surviving makes up most of what we do."
The film's Belgian writers and directors, brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, specialise in dramas set on society's fraying edge. Their films are set in and around their home town of Seraing, a one-time furnace of coal and steel, now long-cooled and low on hope. "I was a huge fan of their work, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to work with them," Cotillard says. "So of course when they asked me it was a huge surprise."'
A month-long rehearsal for Two Days, One Night allowed Cotillard the chance to acclimatise ("melt in", is how she puts it) to the brothers' unusual way of working. In particular, their fondness for shooting scenes in a single take, and then re-shooting and re-shooting them, over and over again, was something new. "I think we did 56 takes of the same scene on the second day," she says. "Another day we did 82 takes, then later we went almost up to 100."
To keep her performance fresh, she created an entire life story for Sandra that she could dip down into, like a well of emotions, when she found herself drying up.
"So, for example, when Sandra has to burst into tears in the middle of a take, I have to feed that with something. But after 40 takes, what I had was not enough, so I had to create more and more."
It is perhaps most evident in the parts of the film in which Sandra wrestles with depression. These are fearsomely realistic scenes that Cotillard says were informed by her own brush with the illness a number of years ago.
"I came close to depression, but when I started to feel I could really lose myself, I somehow escaped it," she says. "But for a while, I knew what it was to have no taste for anything any more. I felt empty and useless. So I took that and emphasised it."
She read around the subject too, in an attempt to more fully understand its symptoms and effects, and avoid wailing, teeth-gnashing cliches.
"When people don't know exactly what depression is, they can be judgmental. 'What, you can't get out of bed in the morning?'," she says, frowning, in a mock-stern tone of voice. "If you don't understand the illness, you just think it can't be that hard to move yourself. And actually, it is."
Cotillard found that Sandra's despair was following her home in the evenings, to the extent that twice during the shoot, she packed off her three-year-old son, Marcel, to stay with his father, the actor and director Guillaume Canet. "I'm affected by the characters I play, and sometimes they're hard to live with," she says.
Compared to the ghost of Piaf, though, it was manageable.
"La Vie en Rose was the first time I had a problem getting out of character," she says, shifting in her seat. "I didn't understand why I couldn't and I was ashamed of it, of not being able to go back to my life."
At the time she was living in Paris, and found that Piaf was inescapable. Her croaky voice would surface unexpectedly during conversation, and she would see the singer's face staring out at her from the mirror.
"My eyebrows and forehead had been shaved for months, and were only starting to grow back, and I looked like s---," she says. "And I would go to a dinner and before arriving, I would realise that it was close to where she had lived. Always, things like that. I felt connected to her in a way that was not healthy for me."
In one of the strange, spiderweb connections that criss-cross Cotillard's career, Non, je ne regrette rien came back to haunt her in Christopher Nolan's science-fiction thriller Inception. Or rather, she came back to haunt it. In that film, the Piaf song is a sign that the dreamworlds created by Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio's psychic spy, are about to collapse, and a sign that Cotillard's character Mal, the pointedly named femme fatale of the piece, refuses to heed.
Inception took place on grey roads and in beige hotel corridors: it took Cotillard – as the spectre of Cobb's wife, luring him to a life in limbo – to charge its world and colour it with emotion.
Next she stars as Lady Macbeth opposite Michael Fassbender in a new film version of the Shakespeare play, which she shot this year. As she talks about the role, the research, the scenery, the accent (she opted for French-inflected English), the various grim mental states she had to plunge herself into, she seems oddly like a character from Inception, freshly returned from another dreamworld.
"Getting in is part of the process, but so is getting out," she says. "I want to go as deep as I can, but in a way that allows me to come back."
The Telegraph, London
FIVE OF FRANCE'S BEST
Audrey Tautou
While only second choice for Amelie after British actress Emily Watson, Tautou's delightful performance won fans around the world. She has since brought her pixiesh charm to such French films as A Very Long Engagement, Priceless and Coco Before Chanel, as well as Dirty Pretty Things in Britain and The Da Vinci Code in Hollywood.
Brigitte Bardot
In the late 1950s, And God Created Woman launched Bardot's reputation as a sex kitten. She made more than 40 movies, including A Very Private Affair, Contempt and Spirits of the Dead, before retiring from acting and singing to become an animal rights activist at 39.
Juliette Binoche
After making her name is such films as Hail Mary and Rendez-vous, Binoche became an international star with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Three Colors: Blue, The English Patient and Chocolat. At 50, she continues to work on adventurous films for acclaimed directors.
Catherine Deneuve
A stunning beauty who became a star with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in the 1960s, Deneuve went on to international acclaim for such films as Repulsion, Belle De Jour and The Last Metro as well as becoming an elegant fashion icon.
Isabelle Huppert
Recognised as one of France's most accomplished actors, which is reflected in more nominations than any other actress for the country's Cesar Awards, Huppert has been a vibrant force in film and theatre since the 1970s. Her films include The Lacemaker, The Piano Teacher and Amour.
Garry Maddox
