Isabelle Huppert to Receive Lumière Award at Thierry Fremaux’s Festival
Beloved French actor Isabelle Huppert will receive the Lumière Award in the city of Lyon in October.
Created by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux, the Lumière Film Festival celebrates classic and contemporary cinema each fall. The Lumière Award honors a leading figure in the world of cinema and their entire body of work.
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Huppert succeeds German director Wim Wenders who was awarded the prize in 2023. Former recipients include Tim Burton, Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, Pedro Almodóvar, Miloš Forman, the Dardenne brothers and Wong Kar-wai, among others.
“It’s a great honor for me to receive the Lumière Award. It’s a magnificent prize, and so is its festival. It’s an award that bears the name of the inventors of cinema! Receiving it fills me with joy and pride,” said Huppert.
A prolific actor who shoots an average of two to three films a year, Huppert has earned global recognition for her work over more than five decades. She won her firs major award in 1978 in Cannes with “Violette,” the first of eight films she did with French New Wave icon Claude Chabrol.
Huppert is famous for portraying complex women unafraid to challenge conventions. Her role as a sexually repressed piano instructor who enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with one of her pupils in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” won her best actress nod in Cannes in 2001.
She went on to head the Cannes jury in 2009, which awarded Haneke with the Palme d’or for “White Ribbon.” Other collaborations with Haneke include his second Palme d’or winner, “Amour,” in 2012, and “Happy End” in 2017.
She has also picked up two best actress prizes from Venice for her roles in Chabrol’s “Story of Women” (1988) and “La Cérémonie” (1995). Huppert was awarded a Special Golden Lion in 2005 and will preside over the jury of the festival’s next edition.
Back in France, she has been nominated for a whopping 16 best actress César awards and won two for her performances in “La Cérémonie” and Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” about a rape survivor who decides to track down her attacker, a film which also earned her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for best actress in 2017.
Over the course of her career, she has worked with famed French auteurs such as Jean-Lud Godard, Jacques Doillon, Maurice Pialat, Benoît Jacquot, Olivier Assayas and François Ozon, among others.
She’s also worked with celebrated international filmmakers such as Otto Preminger in 1974 with “Rosebud”, Rithy Panh (“the Sea Wall”) and Brillante Mendoza (“Captive”), as well as Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, with whom she has shot three films including this year’s Silver Bear winner, “A Traveler’s Needs.”
Huppert made her first foray into Hollywood in 1980 with Michael Cimino “Heaven’s Gate.” Working largely in independent and small-budget cinema in the U.S., she has collaborated with the likes of Curtis Hanson (“The Bedroom Window”), Hal Hartley (“Amateur”), David O. Russell (“I Heart Huckabees”) and more recently Neil Jordan (“Greta”) and Matthew Weiner in Amazon’s “The Romanoffs.”
Huppert enjoys a distinguished career in theater, both in France and internationally. She’s worked with renowned directors such as Bob Wilson, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jacques Lassalle and Romeo Castellucci, and to interpret contemporary authors like Florian Zeller and Yasmina Reza.
Huppert will be awarded the Lumière Prize at a ceremony in Lyon on October 18. The Lumière Film Festival runs from October 12-20. The MIFC, billed as the world’s largest classic film market, will run alongside the festival from October 15-18.
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