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Name: Irène Jacob
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Date of Birth:
July 15, 1966
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Place of Birth:
Suresnes, France
Mini-bio:
An actress whose classic beauty and thoughtful, almost melancholic style of acting have established her as a cinematic representative of European sophistication, Irène Jacob is one of the preeminent F... read morerench actresses of her generation. First becoming known through her association with Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, who cast her as his heroine in both La Double Vie de Véronique and Trois Couleurs: Rouge, Jacob has gone on to work with a number of well-known directors on both sides of the Atlantic.Born in Paris on July 15, 1966, Jacob moved to Geneva with her family when she was three years old. The daughter of a psychologist mother and physicist father, she made her stage debut in Switzerland at the age of 11. She went on to study drama at the Geneva Conservatoire and the prestigious Rue Blanche (the French national drama academy) in Paris and also trained for a time in London. It was while she was working in the theatre that Jacob was spotted by director Louis Malle, who cast her in his Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) -- her first screen role. In 1991, after making a few more French films, Jacob shot to stardom as the lead of Kieslowksi's La Double Vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique). Cast in a dual role as the Polish Veronika and the French Véronique, two women who lead different but indelibly interconnected lives, Jacob drew raves for her performance and won the Cannes Festival's Best Actress Award. Although she was subsequently flooded with offers to star in a number of American films -- including Indecent Proposal -- Jacob largely focused her talents on small French films, again earning international plaudits in 1994 as the protagonist of Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Rouge. Much of her work since then has been for a variety of European directors, including Oliver Parker (for Othello, 1995, which required her, as Desdemona, to read all of her lines in English), Wim Wenders and Michelangelo Antonioni (for Par-Dela Les Nuages, 1995), and Hugh Hudson] (for {#My Life So Far, 1999). Jacob has appeared in the occasional American film, most notably George Hickenlooper's The Big Brass Ring (1999), a political drama that cast her as a journalist on the prowl for campaign scandal. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
Irène Jacob mini-bio: This beautiful, dark-haired Swiss actress made a hit with a supporting role in her first film, as the piano teacher in Louis Malle's "Au revoir, les enfants" (1987). Educated in London and Geneva, and a Paris resident since the age of 18, Jacob became a promising starlet with her Malle success and followed up with another small role in Jacques Rivette's "La bande des quatre/The Gang of Four" (1989). 5Stardom (and a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award) arrived with Jacob's dual role as two women whose lives are mysteriously linked in Krzysztof Kieslowski's psychological drama "The Double Life of Veronique" (1991). She ventured to the US for a ronantic comedy, "Trusting Beatrice" (1991), fittingly, about a young French woman's arrival in the US. After the small film "The Van Gogh Wake" (1993), she played the ill-fated mother in Agnieszka Holland's touching and acclaimed "The Secret Garden" (1993). Several more small French films followed, but it took a reunion with Kieslowski to jump-start Jacob's career again. In his "Red/Rouge" (1994), the final segment of his "Three Colors" trilogy (and his swan song), Jacob starred as a Swiss fashion model who meets a cynical aging ex-judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) after she runs over his dog. In the film, she served as an emotional and spiritual curative for the old man; the second time, Kieslowski employed Jacob as a woman who offers a man consolation and mystery. 6Jacob followed up as a religious devotee in Michaelango Antonioni's episodic "Beyond the Clouds/Par-dela les nuages" (1995), then ventured to England to play Desdemona to Laurence Fishburne's "Othello" (also 1995). Jacob has several foreign-made films in the can which have not yet been released in the US: she plays an East Indian beauty with Willem Defoe and Sam Neill in "Victory" (filmed in 1994), an ill-fated vacationer in "Fugueuses/Runaway" and a French actress in 1948 who befriends a mysterious tramp (Stephen Rea) in "All Men Are Mortal" (both shown at Cannes in 1995).
