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French actress Isabelle Huppert will be the President of the Jury of the 62nd Festival de Cannes which will be held May 13-24, 2009.
“I am very glad and very proud,” she declared as she accepted Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux’s invitation. “I’ve had a long relationship with Cannes and this next meeting will definitely seal my love for the Festival and thus for global cinema. Cannes is the open door to all the new ideas of the world. I am thrilled at the idea of being a privileged spectator in it.”

After appearing in Faustine et le bel été by Nina Companeez, César et Rosalie by Claude Sautet and Le Bar de la fourche by Alain Levent, Isabelle Huppert, who studied at Versailles and Paris conservatoires, was noticed in Les Valseuses by Bertrand Blier with lead actors Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere. She was soon awarded the Suzanne Bianchetti prize as French revelation of the year for her performance in Le Juge et l’Assassin by Bertrand Tavernier. Leading parts followed rapidly, notably in La Dentellière by Claude Goretta and in Violette Nozière by Claude Chabrol, which allowed her to win the first of her two interpretation prizes at Cannes in 1978. In 1980 she starred for Maurice Pialat (Loulou), Jean-Luc Godard (Sauve qui peut (la vie)), Michael Cimino (La Porte du Paradis) and Mauro Bolognini (La Dame aux camélias), in 1981 she worked with Bertrand Tavernier again (Coup de Torchon, for which she was nominated as best actress at the Césars awards) and Jean-Luc Godard in 1982 (Passion).

Isabelle Huppert is a faithful person, faithful to theatre where she never misses the opportunity to come back, staged by Bob Wilson and Claude Régy (she also was Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the London Royal National Theatre), to the Festival de Cannes where she came more than twenty-five times in or Out of Competition, as a mistress of ceremony or as member of the Jury, to head a symposium or present the Palme d’or. She is finally faithful to her directors, from Claude Chabrol (Une affaire de femmes, Merci pour le Chocolat, Rien ne va plus, Madame Bovary, L’Ivresse du pouvoir and La Cérémonie for which she was awarded the César of best actress in 1996) to Benoît Jacquot (Les Ailes de la Colombe, L’Ecole de la chair, La Fausse suivante, Pas de scandale and Villa Amalia, which will be released in 2009). She was also directed by   Christine Pascal, Raoul Ruiz, André Téchiné, Olivier Dahan, Patricia Mazuy, Christian Vincent, Michel Deville, Patrice Chéreau, François Ozon, Diane Kurys, Olivier Assayas, Liliane de Kermadec, Christophe Honoré and Claire Denis (whose next movie White Material will be released in 2009) as well as many foreign filmmakers such as Michael Cimino, Joseph Losey, Marco Ferreri, Alexandre Petrovic, Curtis Hanson, Paul Cox, Marta Metzaros, Mauro Bolognini, Andrej Wajda, Werner Schroeter, the Taviani brothers, Hal Hartley, David O’Russel and Rithy Pahn (with whom she just shot Un Barrage contre le Pacifique) who opened doors to an international career.
In 2001 she was awarded the feminine interpretation prize at Cannes for the second time for her part in La Pianiste by Austrian director Michael Haneke.
She is following Sean Penn who was President in 2008 as well as Liv Ullman, the latest woman to be President of the Jury in 2001.