Annie Girardot

Born in 1931, she was raised by her single mother, a midwife from Normandy. After studying to become a midwife like her mother, she enrolled at the prestigious Conservatoire de la rue Blanche in Paris.

After graduating in 1954 with the "First Prize in Modern and Classical Comedy", she joined the Comédie Française, where she was a resident actor from 1954-57.

In 1955, she began her film career, making her film debut in Treize à table (1955), but it was with theatre that she started to attract the attention of critics.

Her performance in Jean Cocteau's play La Machine à écrire in 1956 was admired by the author who called her "The finest dramatic temperament of the Postwar period"In 1956 she was awarded the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti as best up-and-coming young actress but only with Luchino Visconti's epic Rocco and His Brothers (1960), she was able to draw the public's attention to her.

By the end of the 1960s, she had become a movie star and a box-office magnet in France with such films as Vice and Virtue (1963); Live for Life (1967); Love Is a Funny Thing (1969); and Death of Love (1970), the fact-based tale of a middle-aged teacher whose affair with a much younger student made her the object of bourgeoisie ridicule. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe, and remains Girardot's biggest box office hit in France.

In 1962, she married Italian actor Renato Salvatori.

Travelling back and forth between two film careers in France and Italy, Girardot also worked with renown Italian directors, including Marco Ferreri in the scandalous The Ape Woman (1964). Famously ignored by French New Wave directors (with the exception of Claude Lelouch), Girardot found her glory in popular cinema alongside more established and traditional directors such as Jean Delannoy, Michel Boisrond, André Cayatte, Gilles Grangier, or André Hunebelle.

Throughout the 1970s, Girardot came back and forth between drama and comedy, proving herself an adept comedienne in such successful comedies as Claude Zidi's The Discord (1978), Michel Audiard's _Elle boit pas, elle fume pas, elle drague pas, mais. . .

elle cause! (1970)_ and Philippe de Broca's Dear Inspector (1977).

She also played the mother of upcoming stars like Isabelle Adjani in the hit teen movie La gifle (1974), and Isabelle Huppert in the drama Docteur Françoise Gailland (1976).

Played Isabelle Huppert's mother in two films: Docteur Françoise Gailland (1976) and The Piano Teacher (2001).

Over the course of a five-decade career, she starred in nearly 150 films. She is a three-time César Award winner (1977, 1996, 2002), a two-time Molière Award winner, a BAFTA nominee, and a recipient of several international prizes including the Volpi Cup (Best actress) at the 1965 Venice Film Festival for Three Rooms in Manhattan.

The 1980s were less kind, as her film career floundered and parts dwindled.

Actor Philippe Noiret on Annie Giradot in a 1983 interview "Annie is the easiest person imaginable to work with, but just now she is not doing so very well because she made a lot of bad films, and I think she has some problems finding good scripts. I think the best way she could come back would be to find a role in a good play. She was not very clever in some career choices she made in the last period, and she is this certain kind of woman, aways ready to do anything to help anyone. She will come back because she is an extraordinary actress. I like her very much.".

Her autobiography "Vivre d'aimer" was published in 1989.

Head of jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1992

Revealed that she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2003 (21 September 2006).

She has been living in a Parisian medical house (along with her older brother Jean, also diagnosed with Alzheimer), since mid 2007. During the Summer of 2010, the press revealed that she has now lost all her memories because of Alzheimer disease, and doesn't show any streaks of lucidity anymore as she did until 2009.