Benjamin biolay agnes jaoui biography

CIVIL STATUS
Careers Actress, Screenwriter, Director more
Nationality Frenchwoman
Born 19 October 1964 (Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, France)
BIOGRAPHY
A gifted student, Agnès Jaoui studied at the Lycée Henri IV and entered the Conservatoire at the age of 17. From 1984 onwards, she attended classes at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, directed at the time by Patrice Chéreau. Already appeared in the cinema in Le Faucon (1983, Paul Boujenah), she shot her second film with the entire troupe of Patrice Chéreau and under his direction in Hôtel de France in 1987. That same year, while performing on the stage of Harold Pinter’s L’Anniversaire d’Anniversaire, she met her future partner and work collaborator Jean-Pierre Bacri.

They wrote their first play together entitled Cuisine et dépendances (1992, Philippe Muyl), whose success in the theatre and then in the cinema encouraged them in this path of caustic and disillusioned humour. The general public really discovered them in 1996 with Cédric Klapisch’s adaptation of their second play, Un air de famille. The Bacri-Jaoui style was then referred to and the film was awarded the César for Best Screenplay. Actress Agnès Jaoui was also singled out, thanks to her nomination for the César Award for Best Supporting Actress. After writing the script for Smoking/No smoking in 1993, the couple was asked again by Alain Resnais in 1997 to write, but also to perform, his choral comedy On connais la chanson. While continuing to act alone in a few films (Le Cousin by Alain Corneau, 1998), Agnès Jaoui starred for the first time in Une femme d’extérieur (1999, Christophe Blanc).

The year 2000 marked his successful transition to directing Le Goût des autres, again written with Jean-Pierre Bacri. Winner of 4 César Awards, including Best Film, the feature film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Two years later, she tackled the film in costume, playing the lead role in Laurent Bouhnik’s 24 Hours of a Woman’s Life. In 2003, she co-starred with Karin Viard in François Favrat’s The Role of Her Life, and directed herself again in the comedy Comme une image presented in official competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. She and her co-screenwriter Jean-Pierre Lacri won the award for Best Screenplay.

Agnès Jaoui now divides her time between acting and directing-screenwriting. In 2004, in Richard Dembo’s latest film, Nina’s House, she played the title role of a woman who takes in children deported during the war at the Liberation. She returned to her first love for a while and began a career as a singer with the release of an album with Latin sounds. It was under the triple hat of director-screenwriter-actress that she returned to cinema in 2008 with Parlez-moi de la pluie, co-written with her long-time accomplice Jean-Pierre Bacri. The film also marks the meeting of the Jaoui/Bacri couple with Jamel Debbouze. Four years later, Agnès Jaoui left aside her usual duties as director and screenwriter, appearing in the children’s comedy Du Vent dans mes calves.

In 2013, the tandem she formed with Jean-Pierre Bacri (from whom she had been separated from the city since 2012) returned with a new script, which she directed: Au bout du conte, an offbeat comedy in which the famous duo plays opposite a real troupe of fashionable actors, including Agathe Bonitzer, Arthur Dupont, Benjamin Biolay and Nina Meurisse. A liberated woman crossing paths with Bruno Podalydès in the bewitching Comme un avion and the title role in the comedy Aurore, Jaoui was a member of the Jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, presided over by Pedro Almodóvar.

In 2018, she delivered her new film, Place publique, in which she once again played opposite Bacri. This bittersweet comedy deals with celebrity, social media, and youth. She then made a name for herself in feature films with a social impact, such as the comedy Good Intentions, in which she played a woman overinvested in humanitarian work, and the drama In the Shadow of Girls, in which she is a prisoner in a women’s detention centre who discovers operatic singing.

In 2022, she made a foray into the small screen for season 2 of In Therapy, in which she starred and directed a few episodes. The following year, she played a screenwriter who reunites with her childhood sweetheart at a film school in The Course of Life.