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20. Taxi (1998)
In her breakout film, modern great Marion Cotillard supplies annoying-girlfriend comic relief for Samy Naceri’s gallivanting Marseille taxi driver. The spunkiness and sultriness she gives out in every scene is small beer for her – but you’ve got to start somewhere. There are worse places than in this French box office ram-raider, which spawned a franchise.
19. Innocence (2004)
A little-seen, highly beguiling Lucile Hadžihalilović drama in which a group of schoolgirls emerge from coffins and are inculcated into a mysterious boarding school you might call “femininity”. As dance instructor Mademoiselle Eva, Cotillard is more of a vibe than a character: a smiling stringency. Her utterances, such as “Obedience is the only path to happiness”, feel right out of a fairytale.
18. Big Fish (2003)
Cotillard’s first English-language film part: a supporting role as the pregnant wife who accompanies Billy Crudup to visit his dying father (Albert Finney) in Tim Burton’s fabulist drama. She gets a nice bedside scene as the ailing Finney spins another yarn; with those limpid eyes, there’s no one better for credulous reaction shots. An important entrée for what, by Gallic actor standards, has been an unusually fruitful Hollywood career.
17. Little White Lies (2010)
Another French mega-hit, a deluxe version of the bourgeois-holiday comedy written and directed by Cotillard’s former long-term partner, Guillaume Canet. Repairing to Arcachon with a group of friends fretting over a missing member who’s in hospital, she layers laid-back melancholy into the mix. Laid-back, that is, until her so-called chums subject her to a tubing ordeal behind a boat – and she unleashes a virtuoso swearing display.
16. Nine (2009)
Rob Marshall’s spin on 8½ travesties Fellini something rotten. But, among a stacked cast of cinematic doyennes, Cotillard earns her keep in the pivotal role: the sidelined wife played by Anouk Aimée in the original, the sacrifice on the altar of Daniel Day-Lewis’s director’s egotism. Going one up on the revenge dress, her revenge Broadway showstopper, Take It All, is where her grace ignites into rancour.
15. Assassin’s Creed (2016)
Not quite as challenging a use of Cotillard’s talents as Lady Macbeth for her second collaboration with director Justin Kurzel. As the chief Templar scientist responsible for regressing people into the memories of long-dead killers, she doesn’t get to do any parkour, unlike the rest of the cast. Instead sheis the movie’s still centre, emanating sadomasochistic chill as she skewers Michael Fassbender on the time-travelling gizmo.
14. A Good Year (2006)
“McDonald’s is in Avignon, fish and chips in Marseille” – Cotillard’s cafe owner serves up Gallic sauce straight to Russell Crowe’s expat trader straight in this Peter Mayle-esque jolly. Director Ridley Scott, who owns a Provencal vineyard, gives full rein to his Provencal vineyard-owning fantasies as Crowe – over for a quick property deal – woos the local beauty. Cotillard is the sparring partner a slugger like Crowe needs if he is to stay light on his toes in this pastis screwball.
13. Pretty Things (2001)
A Cotillard deep cut, adapted from enfant terrible Virginie Despentes’ 1998 novel Les Jolies Choses. The actor shows her range, expertly differentiating extrovert party girl and buttoned-up introvert twin sisters. When the former kills herself and the latter hijacks her budding rock-star career, Cotillard turns out to have hypnotic mic presence that proved handy in future jobs.
12. A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Cotillard sports an excellent bird fascinator during a scene in which her vengeful sex worker, Tina Lombardi, assassinates one of the army officers responsible for her soldier boyfriend’s death in the first world war. She is similarly eye-catching in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film; an implacable foil to more benign lead actor Audrey Tautou, dipping into a well of darkness she later used so effectively on big-budget canvases.
11. Annette (2021)
Another demanding singing role for triple-threat Cotillard after La Vie en Rose and Nine – as the soprano partner of Adam Driver’s renegade standup comedian. This time, she had to belt out her numbers live on set, occasionally while Driver pops up from between her legs during cunnilingus. Perhaps by this stage she was a little typecast as a doomed women, or – as in Inception – the projection of an out-of-control male psyche. But it’s still another effortlessly supple turn.
10. Little Girl Blue (2023)
A fascinating memory film that gives a fleeting glimpse into Cotillard’s process; the actor aids director Mona Achache in her quest to comprehend her late writer mother, Carole, by incarnating the latter. It’s a meditation on grief, motherhood and generational abuse, with an unrecognisable Cotillard at its centre. Her sketches of this bohemian firebrand are also a reminder that acting – in seeking to recapture the past – is another form of compulsion.
9. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Her death scene as villain Talia al-Ghul was subject to a bit of an internet pile-on – and Cotillard later admitted she botched it due to being stressed on set. But she is highly effective elsewhere, first as Bruce Wayne’s classy ally Miranda Tate, then unmasking herself and administering the “slow knife” with lethal politesse. Thank God someone – unlike Batman and Bane – could enunciate nicely.
8. Love Me If You Dare (2003)
It didn’t get anywhere near as much overseas love as the likes of The Fifth Element or Amélie – but this French romcom, bringing together future real-life couple Cotillard and Canet, is surprisingly sophisticated. It’s pure high-concept fluff: they play the grownup versions of childhood friends whose games of dare continue into adulthood. Cotillard grounds it, handling her soulmate manqué with a brisk and downbeat frankness.
7. Public Enemies (2009)
Michael Mann tried to shake up the period gangster film free of established mores in this biopic of John Dillinger – and Cotillard’s emotional dexterity made her a perfect fit for his raw-looking digital photography. She feels utterly fresh in the role of Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette, initially wary but charmed by his sense of destiny; less a cliched moll than a flesh-and-blood woman swept up in the hurricane of the great American now.
6. La Vie en Rose (2007)
Often cited as Cotillard’s finest hour – in part because of the association with sacrosanct French icon Edith Piaf. Her performance is a fine technical achievement, with her nailing la Môme’s cramped body language, repertoire of grimaces, and earthy putdowns across multiple decades. But it feels as if Cotillard is hemmed in by biopic conventions and only fleetingly allowed to – as Piaf’s mentor orders – “live the song”. The bravura sequence when the singer segues from the agony of her boxer lover’s death straight to the stage is one such opening.
5. Inception (2010)
In just a handful of minutes, Cotillard has sledgehammer impact as “Mal” (geddit) – the pea in Christopher Nolan’s oneiric mattress-stack. Chief dream infiltrator Leonardo DiCaprio can no longer be trusted to construct his alt.realities for fear of being invaded by the guilt-ridden revenant of his dead wife. Cotillard brings a malefic charge to this solipsistic femme fatale in a part all the more powerful for existing chiefly in the mind’s eye.
4. Rust and Bone (2012)
There is something faintly preposterous about Jacques Audiard’s melodrama – amateur kickboxer romances orca-training amputee?!? – but not about the performances. Cotillard’s gift for wordless communication comes to the fore here as Matthias Schoenaerts’ bruiser tries to coax her back to the land of the living. Shades of shame, detachment, rage and bitterness cascade out of her.
3. Macbeth (2015)
Cotillard and Michael Fassbender surely qualify as the best-looking Macbeths in history. Ultra-grim Australian director Justin Kurzel exploited Cotillard’s Frenchness to cloak her Lady Macbeth in something otherworldly; there is a spacey, dissociative air to her scheming that marks her version out from the usual angry harangues. The tenderness with which she delivers her repentance speech to a vision of her dead child is harrowing.
2. The Immigrant (2013)
James Gray’s slow-burn drama dwells on the flipside of the American Dream: the oppressed and the exploited on whom the Michael Corleones and the Tony Montanas trample as they march upwards. As a Polish New Yorker forced into prostitution, Cotillard’s performance is a miracle of naturalism. Her natural Romantic style curbed by her character’s wariness, she plays the role with an entrancing delicacy. As her ordeals and forbearance pile up, her face starts to look like that of a religious icon.
1. Two Days, One Night (2014)
Cotillard harnessed the sense of gnawing inner dismay that gives her such believability in femme fatale roles to devastatingly realist ends in this Dardenne brothers’ tour de force. She plays a depressive worker at a solar panel factory who, over one weekend, must persuade her colleagues to forgo the €1,000 bonus they’ve been offered to work longer hours, so her company can fire her. Ever attuned to her character’s emotional somersaults, Cotillard not only excels at her trademark expressiveness – but also the reverse: this beleaguered woman threatening to shut down completely. In what writer David Graeber might have called a “bullshit jobs” thriller, or what we can call a capitalism redemption story, Cotillard’s anxiety rollercoaster renders it all the more heartening when she pulls out of this nosedive at the last minute.
