Having mesmerized audiences worldwide for over five decades, award-winning Algerian-French actress Isabelle Adjani unveils the secrets to her artistry.
Photo: Txema Yeste
So much has been written of Isabelle Adjani over the years. Of the artist, the enigma, the one who holds a record for five César wins and two Academy Award nominations. For the French actress of Algerian and German descent, there is something unwavering in all she embodies: a sensibility for all that is explicitly human. “To create, to engage in a creative process, is to participate in the adventure of freedom,” she tells Vogue Arabia. “This is by accepting that failures will count 10 times more than successes. But this severity towards artists reinforces their convictions, and pushes them to go beyond the mastery they already thought they had of their art.”
Photo: Txema Yeste
As someone who has never shied away from exploring the most intimate facets of the human psyche, Adjani continues to enchant, both on stage and screen. With over 50 roles to her name, across a career that has spanned five decades, Adjani states, “What I can tell you is that in every dramatic film I did, it’s not the characters who drive you crazy, but the deep revelation that leads you to understand – through those roles – the human pain in life.” Her most recent endeavors include the forthcoming release of a French period drama this fall, a theater production led by Olivier Steiner, and an upcoming album of duets with acclaimed French and international artists.
Isabelle Adjani in Diabolique
Beyond her grand, almost ethereal presence, lies an endearing nature. Adjani offers a glimpse into her internal world, and discloses a sense of cultural displacement, revealing, “I have personally had to deal with the demands and traditions of three different cultures,” and maintaining, “Algeria is a part of me, and I am also a part of Algeria.” Born in Paris to an Algerian father and German mother, Isabelle Yasmina Adjani was raised bilingual, speaking French and German fluently. Once winning a school recitation contest, she began acting by the age of 12 in amateur theater. Two years later she shot her first film Le petit bougnat in 1970. Her magnetism and angelic charm were enough to move industry professionals. It was at the Comédie-Française that Adjani rose to fame. The rest is history.
Isabelle Adjani in Les soeurs Brontë
Adjani holds a natural radiance, a light flaring in her blue eyes. As first time cover star for Vogue Paris in May 1984 (with many Vogue covers since), photographer Albert Watson captured her exquisite features. He immortalized her porcelain skin and doe-eyed glances, a face reminiscent of distant times. With an allure that is entirely in keeping with the poetry of her roles, she has long been regarded as an ambassador for a beauty that frees – one that speaks of personal convictions. She remains one of the most memorable Dior spokesmodels of all time, once the face of the perfume Poison, in 1985. “I love oriental perfumes,” she reveals. “Many compositions are woody; the amber and animal musk smells are extraordinary. At times, I wear Oud Ispahan by Dior, which evokes the atmosphere and scents of an oriental palace.” Lately, her partnership with L’Oréal has become synonymous with an advocacy for well-being and self-esteem. Her stylistic choices are as eclectic as the actress herself. Recent collaborations include walking for Ami Fall 2022 at men’s fashion week, gracing the runway in leather gloves and her classic pout.
Isabelle Adjani in Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
“Acting requires one to engage with the characters, without being overwhelmed by them,” she says of her process. “Avoiding the temptation to become the character. Never forget that acting is interpreting; it is remaining free to transmit your own emotions beyond what the character may feel. Flirting with excess, without falling into it.” In L’histoire d’Adèle H. by François Truffaut, she portrayed Victor Hugo’s daughter who falls madly in love with an English lieutenant; a spurned love that leads her to madness and committed to a psychiatric asylum. In Camille Claudel, Bruno Nuytten’s 1988 film, Adjani is a sculptress who is tortured by never being loved for who she is, neither by her family nor the artist Auguste Rodin, the love of her life. “Camille Claudel never gave up,” she reminisces of the role. “She wanted to reach the ideal, the absolute, in love as well as in her art.” Confessing to the autobiographical nature of her work, Adjani explains, “The diapason of emotions is always present – but the intimate vibrations change, according to the roles and the professional and personal context in which you find yourself when you interpret them.” For her, the balance is fragile. “Sometimes you waver a little between too much and not enough,” she adds. “The distance is much closer than one thinks.” In 1979, Adjani had a son with Bruno Nuytten, Barnabé Saïd- Nuytten, who is currently an actor and composer himself. A relationship with English actor Daniel Day-Lewis would also follow, with the birth of their son, Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis, now also an actor, model, and singer-songwriter in his own right.
Isabelle Adjani in Ishtar
For Adjani, it is the roles’ powers of conviction that draw her to such characters. “Expressing their feelings, as well as their values and desires for accomplishment,” she reflects. “What I like about biopics is the tangent. It’s precisely these liberties that we can and must take with history, with events, with reality – to create a work that has the breath of life, a work that can transport the public, all audiences, even people who are not necessarily interested in the characters in these films, nor in their era.” Her most recent period piece is by Josée Dayan, director of the upcoming two-part drama Diane de Poitiers. “It was exhilarating!” she exclaims of the role. “There is no written record of who the great favorite of King Henry II – whose wife was Catherine de Medici – really was. Diane de Poitiers is a mystery to us but also to her contemporaries. Josée Dayan gave me a lot of freedom to play a very modern and very romantic Diane: a woman who was very much in love, but who knew what she wanted – especially in terms of financial independence. She is an emancipated and free woman of the Renaissance. A tremendous time for culture and the arts.”
Isabelle Adjani in La reine Margot
Prolonging her everlasting love affair with the theater, she recently debuted Le vertige Marilyn, soon to engage in a world tour. Sixty years following the passing of Marilyn Monroe, writer Olivier Steiner has imagined a discussion between the two cinema icons he admires: Monroe and Adjani. This imaginary dialogue between the two luminaries of the arts draws from the very last interview that Monroe gave before her death, as from various interviews with Adjani. The piece is performed in the same Dior dress Monroe wore in her “last sitting” with Bert Stern. Though she is not portraying Monroe herself, a shared radiance is felt – just as a fragility that lingers between both women. With her naturally crystalline voice, at times barely stronger than a murmur, Adjani perfectly echoes the depth of Monroe. Carrying within it, the mutual thrills, and pains of their artistry. “Steiner made me connect with her vulnerability, with her flaws, which can also sometimes be mine,” she offers. “For the audience, I hope they hear both the hopes and the distress of a woman who was reduced to her plastic beauty without hearing how intelligent and talented she was. But she is the one who speaks to the audience, she is the one who is as convincing as I can be when I speak about myself without detours… which is not obvious for me.” An exceptionally private individual, the personal resonance is evident in Adjani’s words. “Steiner underlined echoes and sighs that intermingle, without necessarily answering each other, and this evokes the strength and fragility of a woman who lives at the same time under the spotlight, under the fire of love and under the fire of a society that inflicts wounds that can become deadly.”
Photo: Getty
Traces of Adjani’s personal accounts further manifest in the 2020 film Sisters. Partially inspired by Algerian-French director Yamina Benguigui’s family, the film portrays the ordeals faced by the daughters of Algerian immigrants in France, who are torn between two cultures. As Adjani explains, “It shows in a moving way that emancipation does not necessarily mean denying one’s origins or rejecting everything that makes you different in the eyes of others.” In portraying the role of Zorah, greater emotions would resurface for Adjani, as filming took place in her father’s homeland. “When I shot some scenes in Algiers, I was overwhelmed thinking about my father’s family, who I do not know much about. Who was my grandmother? What kind of woman was she? By playing Zorah, I adhered to Benguigui’s vision of my character: to face her own contradictions and assume the totality of her history and her actions.” Of the film’s essence, she adds, “Liberation has a price that women are too often the only ones to pay, but they cannot help but assume the consequences of their actions, even when there are collateral victims.” Adjani has remained outspoken against the anti-Algerian sentiment in her native France. Throughout her career, she has fought racism against immigrants.
At the Chanel SS21 show
Considering her personal connection to the Arab world, it is regional elements of architecture that have resonated with the artist recently. She was moved by her recent visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, of which she recalls, “I was struck by the audacity of the Arab promoters who commissioned these fabulous creations, combining the fundamentals of traditional Arab architecture, such as the moucharabieh, fountains, and domes with the purist lines of international contemporary architecture.” She shares that she “used to love to travel,” but now finds the exercise frustrating. “It has become very difficult even taking a train – of course it helps with the environment, but now I find myself visiting in a virtual way the most amazing places that still exist on this planet. I’m a Portuguese resident and I feel very good and serene when I’m in this country, whether it’s in the north or in the south.”
Isabelle Adjani at Cannes 201
Music is another vessel that transports Adjani. With an early singing career boasting popular songs (notably Pullmarine, written especially for her by Serge Gainsbourg), she reveals her exclusive collaborations in an impending album of duets. “I had the pleasure of working with Benjamin Biolay, Étienne Daho, Gaëtan Roussel, Seal, and a few ghosts like the great singer and composer Christophe, who died of Covid in April 2020.” Due to be released next spring, Adjani reflects on the creative process. Her fervor for music remains ever as palpable. “I think the huge difference between singing and playing is that music and voice have an immaterial essence that protects them from the erosion of time.” When she recorded Wo Wo Wo Wo in 2008 with Christophe, she recalls he had the same voice as when he sang Les mots bleus in 1974. “This musical immateriality also allows one to remember the words of a song that particularly touched them, for the rest of their lives. When I sing, my whole being is in tune with my voice. It’s an incredible feeling of regeneration, and of fulfillment – even when the songs are sad.”
At Cannes 2021
Amid her famous personages, what Adjani reveals is her tenderness toward life, human nature, and the arts. On the traces left from each role, she concludes, “Fortunately, all these powerful characters, all these astonishing, admirable, sometimes frightening women, do not stay by my side when a film or a play ends. I would go bananas! That said, there is always something of them left in me, but I try to keep only the best.” In her nuanced interpretations, one witnesses the essence of her artistry: to teach the heart the understanding of itself.
Originally published in the October 2022 issue of Vogue Arabia
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