French after all: the Hollywood career of Marion Cotillard

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to shed light on the aspects of the persona which enabled Marion Cotillard to have a long-lasting career in Hollywood where so many other French stars have failed, by analysing her most important roles, as well as her image in the English-speaking press. Even if her Americanisation distinguished her from her fellow countrywomen like Audrey Tautou or Juliette Binoche, Cotillard nonetheless never lost her Frenchness, which played just as important a role in her Hollywood success. By comparing Cotillard to other female French stars such as Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche or Audrey Tautou, I show how she followed a tradition of representations of French women that enabled her to distinguish herself from other Hollywood stars who do not possess this ‘exoticness’, but also how she differentiated herself from her compatriots popular in the US. I also underline the complexity of her persona, which prevented being trapped in a monolithic and fixed national stereotype, and enabled her to embody an eminently singular variation on this stereotype, perfectly adapted to the American ideological context of the 2010s.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational stardom
• Hollywood
• French stars
• national identity
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Cf. http://www.boxofficemojo.com.

2. These parts, which gave her more opportunity to shine than The Dark Knight Rises, probably helped in putting behind her the scene of her death in Nolan’s film, which had given rise to a flood of criticism and mocking on the internet for her lack of credibility (Cotillard turns her head rapidly to the side as her eyes close, after having exhaled loudly). As Ginette Vincendeau (2018a) points out, it’s also through self-deprecation that she got over that incident. In May 2015, she played in a sketch on Canal +, in which she is looking for a partner to make a rap career with. Among those auditioning, Orelsan finishes his rap with: ‘The only thing worse than your rap is your death in Batman’. In November 2016, when Allied was released, signalling her return to a major Hollywood role, many English articles mentioned this sketch and an interview with Cotillard for Allociné in order to highlight the star’s self-deprecation.

3. Here I’m using ‘transnational’ with a different meaning from ‘international’. Quoting Sabrina Qiong Yu: ‘“International star” refers to a star who achieves international recognition and fame, even if he or she never makes a film outside his or her own country. Many Hollywood stars fall into this category. By comparison, a transnational star needs to physically transfer from one film industry to another to make films, often in a different language from his or her own.’

4. Since it is her success in the US that I’m attempting to shed light on here, I will analyse Cotillard’s discourses in the US press, but also articles published online on English-speaking websites, which also inform her US persona.

5. La Vie en Rose was described by the New York Times’ critic as similar to a Hollywood musical biopic (Scott 2007), whereas Public Enemies allowed Cotillard to show that she could excel in the gangster film genre. Even though Nine (2009) was a commercial and critical flop, it nevertheless gave her an opportunity to show her love of US musicals (Lewis 2007, Sykes 2009).

6. That’s if we exclude the somewhat particular case of Claudette Colbert, who was born in France but raised in the US and was naturalised as a US citizen during her childhood. Indeed, even if some of her films play on her French origins (Viviani 2007, p. 290), also mentioned many times in the press, Colbert easily established herself as an ‘American actress’ (see for example Photoplay, January 1941, p. 50), particularly because, like Leslie Caron, nominated at the Oscars for her performance in Lili (1953), she never had a career in France before becoming a Hollywood star, whereas actresses such as Simone Signoret, Audrey Tautou or Marion Cotillard were first French stars. Helped by her fluent English, Colbert plays an American in the three films that got her nominated at the Oscars: It Happened One Night (1934), Private Worlds (1935) and Since You Went Away (1944). The second of these films demonstrates the gap that separates Colbert from other French stars, as she plays alongside Charles Boyer, who plays a Frenchman and talks, as he always does, with a very strong accent limiting his Americanisation.

7. On the first page of the article devoted to this « famed seductress of French Films » in January 1967, the US magazine Life chose a photo where Jeanne Moreau is shot from behind, holding in her hand a mirror that reflects her face, thereby isolating it from the rest of her body. The caption reads: “Jeanne Moreau begins the day by attending to her famous face.” (Anon. 1967, 39)

8. If we ignore her brief apparition in Godzilla (2014).

9. The film made 6.5 million dollars at the US box office, more than any other French film that Cotillard starred in, excepting La Vie en Rose (cf. boxofficemojo.com).

10. This storyline motif reflects a common masculinist rhetoric, widespread in groups of the father’s rights movement such as Fathers 4 Justice (Dupuis-Déri 2019, p. 171–194).

11. In the years immediately following the events of 9–11, Hollywood avoids showing this traumatic event, the bodies of the victims and terrorists, as well as the towers themselves (Bondurand Mouawad 2016, p. 287–295). From the middle of the decade, when Hollywood starts to show these things, it’s mostly indirectly and in science fiction films (Sánchez-Escalonilla 2010, p. 11).

12. I put this term in quotation marks because the representation of a ‘masculinity in crisis’ or discourses on a ‘crisis of masculinity’ do not correspond to a real loss of power by men but rather constitute a ‘rhetorical strategy’ whose goal is to reaffirm the necessity of patriarchy (Dupuis-Déri 2019).

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Jules Sandeau

Jules Sandeau is ATER at the Université Paul-Valéry-Montpellier. His phD studied the evolution of Katharine Hepburn’s persona and its reception in the United States, and his works are mainly on classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema. He has most notably published the articles: « Katharine Hepburn en reine de cœur: Mary of Scotland (John Ford, 1936) », LISA e-journal, vol. XIV-n°2, « Based upon a Life: The Biopic Genre in Question », 2016; « Enjeux socio-culturels et réception de la comédie Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table ! », Studies in French Cinema, 2016; « Retour sur les films de gangsters hollywoodiens des années 30: codage et décodage de masculinités marginalisées », Genre en séries: cinéma, télévision, médias, n°1, mars 2015.