Andrew Pulver 

Post your questions for Isabelle Huppert

She’s worked with most of the great names of European cinema, from Godard to Haneke, and on one of Hollywood’s greatest disasters. Now she’s ready for your closeup quizzing
  
  

Isabelle Huppert at the Venice film festival this month.
Isabelle Huppert at the Venice film festival this month. Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

France has quite a few grandes dames of cinema, with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Adjani all very much in the game. But none can hold much of a candle to Isabelle Huppert, who is firing on all cylinders as she enters her 70s, in her sixth decade of headline acting performances. Tightly wound and fiery, while simultaneously self-contained and tough as nails, Huppert’s acting persona has been instrumental to a string of masterpieces – and even if the film around her isn’t that great, she’s always magnificent to watch.

With so many amazing credits, stretching back to the 1970s, it’s hard to pick out a few, but we’ll have a go: early attention-grabbers like The Lacemaker and The Judge and the Assassin that graduated to fully-fledged lead performances in Loulou and Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary. Then the really extraordinary ones: La Cérémonie, Ruth Rendell’s scary domestic thriller; the traumatic and traumatising The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke; Claire Denis’ steely White Material; and, of course, Paul Verhoeven’s transgressive rape thriller Elle, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Huppert also likes a collaboration: she’s made numerous films with Chabrol, Haneke, Bertrand Blier – and François Ozon, the director of her new one, The Crime Is Mine, a period thriller in which she plays a washed-up silent film star, released on 18 October in the UK and Ireland. (Back in 2002 she appeared in Ozon’s cosy-crime musical 8 Women.)

So what would you like to ask Huppert as she drops in for the Guardian reader interview? Maybe something about Heaven’s Gate, not her first English-language film but the one that brought down the American auteur era? Or what it was like working with Jean-Luc Godard? Whatever is on your mind, please leave a question in the comments by 4pm on Tuesday.

 

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