Emmanuelle Béart

Since 1972, French actress Emmanuelle Béart (1963) has appeared in over 50 film and television productions. Initially cast for her extraordinary beauty, Béart has emerged over the years as one of France's best actresses. The sapphire-eyed Béart has been nominated eight times for a César Award and she won for Best Supporting Actress in the film Manon des Sources (1986).


Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no 43033.

A beautiful blonde shepherd

Emmanuelle Béart was born Emmanuelle Béhart-Hasson in St. Tropez (some sources say Gassin), on the French Riviera, in 1963. She was the daughter of Geneviève Galéa, a former model, and Guy Béart, a singer and poet. She lived with her mother, brothers, and sister on a farm not far from Saint-Tropez in Provence (southern France), because her father did not want his children to be affected by the glamour world of Paris. Following her parents' divorce, Emmanuelle was raised by her mother in Gassin. In her teens, she appeared in bit parts on television and in the offbeat crime drama La course du lièvre à travers les champs/And Hope To Die (René Clément, 1972) starring Jean-Louis Trintignant.

In her late teens, she spent her summer vacation with the English-speaking family of a close friend of her father in Montreal. At the end of the summer, the family invited her to stay with them and complete her baccalauréat at Collège International Marie de France. In Montreal, she met director Robert Altman, who encouraged her to become an actress. She took a screen test for him, but nothing came of it. Upon graduating she returned to France to attend drama school in Paris. She appeared in the last erotic film of photographer David Hamilton, Premier Desirs/First Desires (1984).

For both her roles in Un amour interdit/A Strange Passion (Jean-Pierre Dougnac, 1985) and the comedy L'amour en douce/Love on the Quiet (Édouard Molinaro, 1986), she was nominated for a César as Most Promising Actress. In 1986 she achieved fame as a beautiful blonde shepherd and also the vengeful daughter of the late Jean de Florette in Manon des Sources/Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri, 1986) opposite Yves Montand. Manon des Sources is the critically acclaimed and commercially successful sequel to Jean de Florette, adapted from the 1966 two-volume novel by Marcel Pagnol, who wrote it based on his own earlier film of the same title. For her performance, she won the 1987 César Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Less successful was her Hollywood stint as an angel in the fantasy comedy Date with an Angel (Tom McLoughlin, 1987) starring Phoebe Cates and Michael E. Knight. In the following years, she was five times nominated for César the Award for Best Actress: Les Enfants du désordre/Children of Chaos (Yannick Bellon, 1990), La Belle Noiseuse/The Beautiful Troublemaker (Jacques Rivette, 1990), Un cœur en hiver/A Heart in Winter (Claude Sautet, 1993), Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud/Nelly and Mr Arnaud (Claude Sautet, 1996) and Les Destinées Sentimentales/Sentimental Destinies (Olivier Assayas, 2001).

Other interesting films were Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa/Captain Fracassa's Journey (Ettore Scola, 1990) with Vincent Perez, the drama J'embrasse pas/I Don't Kiss (André Téchiné, 1991), starring Manuel Blanc and Philippe Noiret, and L'Enfer/Hell (Claude Chabrol, 1994), adapted from the screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot for the unfinished film L'Enfer (1964).


French postcard by Ediions F. Nugeron, no. 3. Photo: Collection de l'Ecole de Cinéma Camiris. Publicity still for Manon des Sources/Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri, 1986).


French postcard in the Le jour se lève series by Editions Humour à la carte, Paris, no. ST-168. Photo: Jean-Pierre Larcher.

Mission: Impossible

In the mid-1980s, Emmanuelle Béart began a relationship with Daniel Auteuil, her co-star in L'amour en douce/Love on the Quiet, Manon des Sources/Manon of the Spring, Un cœur en hiver/A Heart in Winter and Une femme française/A French Woman. They married in 1993 but divorced in 1998. For her starring role in Une femme française/A French Woman (Régis Wargnier, 1995), she won the Silver St. George for Best Actress award at the 19th Moscow International Film Festival.

She did another role in a Hollywood production, Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996), produced by and starring Tom Cruise. The film was the third-highest-grossing of the year and received positive reviews from film critics, but her window-dressing role did not lead to more American films. In France, she found more interesting parts in the period drama Le Temps retrouvé/Time Regained (Raúl Ruiz, 1999), an adaptation of the final volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, and in the dark comedy musical 8 Femmes/8 Women (François Ozon, 2002), in which she parodied the erotic French maid stereotype.

In the 5 May 2003 issue of the French edition of Elle magazine, Béart, aged 39, appeared nude with a younger man. The entire print run of 550,000 copies sold out in just three days, making it the biggest-selling issue in the fashion glossy's long history. In 2007, she participated in Les témoins/The Witnesses (André Téchiné, 2007) about the first outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. In addition to her screenwork, Béart is also known for her social activism. She is an ambassador for UNICEF and is known for her opposition to France's anti-immigration legislation. In 1996, she made headlines when defending the rights of the ‘sans-papiers’ (black illegal immigrants), she was forcibly removed from a siege in a Paris church. In March 2012, Béart spoke out against plastic surgery in Le Monde, saying that she regretted having an operation on her lips in 1990 when she was 27.

Since 2010, she preferes to concentrate on the theatre. She often works with director Stanislas Nordey, who has chosen her as an associate artist since he took over as director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg in 2014. In 2016, she was a member of the jury of the Cabourg Festival. Then in 2017, she played in the New Zealand drama 'Beyond the Known World', by Pan Nalin, and in 2019 she reunited with Jeanne Balibar for the dramatic comedy 'Merveilles à Montfermeil'.

Emmanuelle Béart married twice and has two children. Her first husband was frequent co-star Daniel Auteuil (1993-1995), with whom she has a daughter, Nelly Auteuil (1993). Later, Béart was romantically linked to music producer David Moreau, half-brother of singer Patrick Bruel, with whom she has a son Yohann Moreau (1996), and to film producer Vincent Meyer for two years until his suicide in May 2003. In 2008, she married actor, Michaël Cohen. Together they adopted Surifel, a then 8-month-old Ethiopian boy. The couple divorced in 2011. In 2018, she married director, screenwriter and director of photography Frédéric Chaudier.


German postcard, 1991. Emmanuelle Béart and Michel Piccoli in La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991).


Trailer for Le Temps retrouvé/Time Regained (1999). Source: Boudward (YouTube).

Sources: Rebecca Flint Marx (AllMovie), Wladimir van Heemst (IMDb), Wikipedia (English and French), and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 7 May 2023.