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Irene Jacob Biography
Irène Marie Jacob (born July 15, 1966) is a French-born Swiss actress.


Irène Jacob was born in Paris, France, the youngest child after three brothers. She comes from a highly educated and intellectual family, her father is a physicist, her mother a psychologist, and of her brothers, one is a musician and the other two are scientists.

As an infant, her family moved to Geneva, Switzerland where, as a young girl, she became interested in the arts, making her stage debut at the age of 11. She attended the Geneva Conservatory of Music, earned a degree in languages (she speaks English, German, Italian and French), studied acting in Paris at the prestigious Rue Blanche (the French national drama academy) and at the Dramatic Studio in London, England.

Three years after Ms. Jacob's return to Paris, the then 21-year-old drama student obtained her first movie role in the 1987 film Au revoir les enfants followed by several more minor roles until her big break came when Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski cast her in the lead role of his 1991 motion picture, La Double vie de Véronique. For her performance, Ms. Jacob won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

An introvert by nature, Jacob has the remarkable ability to express the emotional turmoil of her characters with very few words. This was very evident when Kieslowski used her again to star alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant in Three Colors: Red, the third part of his highly acclaimed masterpiece, the Three Colors trilogy. The film, and her performance, gained huge international recognition bringing many offers from major American motion-picture studios. Her highest grossing US picture as of 2004 was U.S. Marshals (released 1997), in which she starred opposite Tommy Lee Jones.

Jacob's film career slowed down in subsequent years, and after a series of independent, mostly European, movies, she revived her theatre career. Her 2000/2001 London West-End performance as the title character in Madame Melville opposite Macaulay Culkin was crucial to that development.

Filmography

Mille millièmes (Landlords) - 2002
Lettre d'une inconnue - 2001
Léaud l'unique - 2001
L’ Affaire Marcorelle - 2000
Londinium - 2000
The Pornographer: A Love Story - 2000
The Big Brass Ring - 1999
Cuisine chinoise - 1999
History Is Made at Night - 1999
My Life So Far - 1999
Cuisine américaine - 1998
U.S. Marshals - 1998
Incognito - 1997
Beyond The Clouds - 1996
All Men Are Mortal - 1995
Faire un film pour moi c'est vivre - 1995
Fugueuses - 1995
Othello - 1995
Par-delà les nuages - 1995
Victory - 1995
Le Moulin de Daudet - 1994
Predskazaniye - 1994
Trois couleurs: Rouge - 1994
The Secret Garden - 1993
Claude - 1992
Enak - 1992
La Double vie de Véronique - 1991
Le Secret de Sarah Tombelaine - 1991
Erreur de jeunesse - 1990
La Passion Van Gogh - 1990
La Veillée - 1990
Les Mannequins d'osier - 1989
La Bande des quatre - 1988
Au revoir les enfants - 1987
 
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Irene Jacob.