Trivia: One of the most enduring and respected actresses in French cinema, Isabelle Huppert is known for her versatile portrayals of characters ranging from the innocent to the sultry to the comic. Born March 16, 1953, in Paris, Huppert graduated from the Paris Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique and made her first film, Faustine et le Bel Été, when she was 16. Her career accelerated rapidly, and she soon found work with such acclaimed directors as Bertrand Blier, with whom she made Les Valseuses (1974), a film also notable for making a star out of Gérard Depardieu; Otto Preminger, for whom she appeared in Rosebud (1975); and Claude Chabrol, with whom she would make a series of films, starting with 1978's Violette Nozière, for which she won a Best Female Performance award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. Also in 1978, she won a British Academy Award for Best Newcomer for her role in La Dentellière (The Lacemaker).Huppert's career in the 1980s commenced fairly inauspiciously, with a part in the legendary flop Heaven's Gate (1981), but it soon picked up with starring roles in Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon (1981), Jean-Luc Godard's Passion (1982), and Diane Kurys' celebrated Entre Nous (1983). Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Huppert made an impressive number of films in her native country, collaborating with Claude Chabrol on 1988's Une Affaire de Femmes (Story of Women), the widely acclaimed Madame Bovary (1991), and La Cérémonie (1995), for which she won a 1996 Best Actress César. Since the Heaven's Gate fiasco, Huppert's work in American film has been minimal, a worthwhile exception being her role as a nun-turned-nymphomaniac writer of pornographic fiction in Hal Hartley's Amateur (1994). In her native France, Huppert has become something of an institution, continuing to work prolifically on such films as Benoît Jacquot's L'École de la Chair (1998) and serving as the 24th president of the César Awards in March 1999.Despite the fact that American audiences remained sadly unaware of Huppert's success overseas, her performances in Jacquot's False Servant and the historical drama Saint-Cyr (both 2000) found her meeting challenging roles head on to captivating effect. The sometimes disturbing films she appeared in may not have been the easiest for audiences to digest, but they certainly cemented her belief that the art of acting is a means of "living out one's insanity," and no matter what the subject matter or quality of the actual film, Huppert remained a consistently compelling screen presence. Huppert's success in Chabrol's Merci Pour le Chocolat (2000) came as no surprise to many given her successful track record with the enduring director, and the following year she would once again come under the international spotlight for her remarkable performance as a sexually repressed and self-destructive piano teacher in director Michael Haneke's confrontational drama The Piano Teacher (2001). Her fearless powerhouse performance shocked audiences worldwide and earned Huppert a Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was soon counterbalanced by director François Ozon's popular international black comedy 8 Women the following year. A campy, freewheeling musical mystery starring some of the biggest female stars in French cinema, the film came as an unexpected but infectious jolt of originality to audiences whose skin had been worn thin by a recent spat of heavy dramas. Huppert's performance as an opinionated hooker who forms an unexpected bond with her illegitimate daughter in 2002's Ghost River benefited the touching drama well, and the following year, she was back with Haneke for the disturbing The Time of the Wolf. As with many of Haneke's films, The Time of the Wolf sharply divided audiences -- some of whom saw the film as celluloid perfection and others who viewed it as unrelentingly downbeat garbage. In 2003, Huppert would appear under the direction of an American director for the first time since 1994's Amateur with a role in Three Kings director David O. Russell's comedy I Heart Huckabees.

Trivia: French comic actor Jean-Pierre Cassel made his movie debut at the invitation of Gene Kelly, who cast Cassel in the 1956 Paris-filmed seriocomedy The Happy Road (1956). At least, that's what the press releases claimed; actually, the tall, elastic-faced Cassel had been plugging away in films on a minor basis since 1950. Shortly after getting his big break in Happy Road, Cassel was perfectly cast in the naif title role in the 1958 film version of Voltaire's Candide. He has since been a stalwart in the comedies of director Phillipe de Broca, nearly always playing latter-day variations of the ingenuous Candide. In 1974, Jean-Pierre Cassel added thousands of American filmgoers to his fan following with his appearances as the bumbling King Louis XIII in Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. Cassel died of cancer, at age 74, on April 19, 2007.

Trivia: Born Jacqueline Fraser, in Weybridge, England, onetime model Jacqueline Bisset was vaulted into stardom on the strength of two 1967 films: In the over-produced spy spoof Casino Royale, she attracted attention as the alluring Giovanni Goodthighs; even more impressive (so far as critics were concerned) was her near-microscopic role in Stanley Donen's Two for the Road, in which Bisset plays the vacationing British schoolgirl whose sudden case of the measles makes the rest of the plot possible. (She reprised and expanded upon this bit in a film-within-a-film in François Truffaut's Day for Night in 1973.) First cast on the basis of her looks alone, Bisset later developed into a top-notch actress, as evidenced by her performances in The Grasshopper (1969) and The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1972). She came to so despise her earlier sexpot image that she insisted that no still photos of her wet T-shirt scenes in The Deep (1977) be reproduced for publication. That year, Newsweek magazine voted her "the most beautiful film actress of all time." In 1978, she played another famous Jackie (although not so named) in The Greek Tycoon, an à clef version of the Aristotle Onassis saga. A more mature but no less dazzlingly beautiful Bisset was later seen in a kinky secondary role in Zalman King's Wild Orchid (1990). The actress received critical acclaim in 2001 for her portrayal of a dying woman's search for the daughter she never knew in Christopher Munch's drama The Sleepy Time Gal. She continued to work steadily in a variety of projects including playing Jacqueline Kennedy in American's Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story, Domino, Death in Love, and An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving, as well as appearing on the TV series Nip/Tuck.

Trivia: Hailed as everything from the "leadeuse" of the new generation of French actresses to a young Isabelle Adjani or Sophie Marceau, Virginie Ledoyen is one of the fastest rising stars of the early 21st century. Bearing a dark-eyed, agile beauty, Ledoyen has brought fresh, bona fide talent to the face of both French and international cinema.Born in Aubervilliers on November 15, 1976, Ledoyen got her first taste of show business when, as a five-year-old model, she was used for an advertisement made by a friend of her mother's. The experience got her hooked on acting, and at the age of seven she began attending the Parisian drama school l'Ecole du Spectacle. Three years later, she appeared in her first film, Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan, and a year after that, she began acting on the stage. The early '90s saw Ledoyen began to do steady film work, with a small part in the bedroom comedy Les Marmottes (1993) followed by two strong leading roles in Olivier Assayas' L'eau froide (1994) and Benoît Jacquot's La vie de Marianne (1994). She again worked with Jacquot in 1995's La fille seule, in which she starred as a pregnant young hotel worker who goes about her job after telling her sullen boyfriend she intends to have his baby. The film, which focused almost solely on Ledoyen for 90 minutes, was something of a surprise art house hit in the States, and Ledoyen's performance earned her a César nomination. Thanks to the film's success and a strong supporting performance in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie that same year, the young actress was soon taking calls from such directors as Woody Allen and Abel Ferrara. Following a supporting role in Hong Kong director Edward Yang's Mahjong (1996), Ledoyen starred as a young musician whose sudden fame causes her to engage in all sorts of questionable behavior in Héroïnes (1997); although the film received mixed reviews, Ledoyen's work was widely praised. The following year, her recognition and respect continued to grow, thanks to solid work in no less than four films. En Plein Coeur featured her as a petty criminal who becomes involved with an older, wealthy man, while Assayas's Fin Aout Debut Septembre was a romantic ensemble drama that cast Ledoyen as a young designer who navigates the uncertainties of love.In Olivier Duscatel's acclaimed musical comedy about AIDS, Jeanne et le Garçon Formidable, the actress played a young woman who finds her perfect guy in a man who happens to be HIV-positive and earned a Best Actress award at the Paris Film Festival for her work. That same year, she had a small but pivotal role in Merchant-Ivory's A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, which succeeded in introducing her to a new audience. But however successful that film may have been in widening Ledoyen's fan base, it was nothing compared to the hype surrounding the actress' starring role alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach (2000), Danny Boyle's adaptation of Alex Garland's novel about paradise found and then brutally lost.