She buried Bond, deceived the most powerful people in Dune and is now firmly established in Hollywood. Léa Seydoux could have rested on her laurels by now and only reap blockbuster rewards of her success. However, this (outstanding!) French actress does not forget the arthouse and continues participating in daring artistic projects.
Case in point: Bertrand Bonello's The Beast and Quentin Dupieux's The Second Act, both of which are on this year's New Horizons programme. So: we encourage you to admire Léa Seydoux's talent on the cinema screen, and in between screenings – to read the text dedicated to the actress, written by Marta Górna for Wyborcza.pl.
Fortunately, she gave up her dreams of an opera singer career in time, as cinema would have lost one of the best actresses of the last twenty years.
Léa Seydoux can find her way in a wide variety of repertoire. From Bond to sophisticated art cinema. We will soon see the new version of her in The Beast, or rather – as Dawid Dróżdż wrote in Wyborcza – in three new versions. Bertrand Bonello's film, based on a short story by Henry James, will be one of the events of this year's New Horizons.
‘The film interweaves three stories set in 1910, 2014 and 2044 in Paris and Los Angeles. In each episode, Gabrielle (the character played by Seydoux) meets Louis (George MacKay). The lovers reconstruct their relationship as they try to overcome their fears. ‘It's a remarkable story of eternally unfulfilled love, which Bonello has encapsulated in the non-obvious form of a melodrama, SF, thriller and horror film,’ wrote Dróżdż. – Seydoux creates three delightful different roles'.
There will also be one more film at the New Horizons starring the actress, Quentin Dupieux's The Second Act.
It is ‘a satire on the film industry – sulky actors, hung up celebrities, an increasingly pronounced political correctness and even a vision of cinema made with artificial intelligence. The director traditionally mixes reality with fiction, truth with falsehood, and film with film'. The cast includes stars of French cinema.
Léa Seydoux captivates and intrigues
The French actress intrigues audiences from the first second she appears on the screen. She extraordinarily mesmerises in The Story of My Wife. In the beginning, you cannot even see her profile. It is obscured by fashionably cropped blonde hair and cigarette smoke. But when Jakob, the film's main character, sees her face, he no longer has a choice. He has to marry her. Not least because he has just made a bet with a friend that he will marry the first woman to enter the café, and she walks across its threshold after a few minutes. Lizzy has a magnetism about her. Despite her slightly protruding ears and diastema, she seems to Jakob the most beautiful woman in the world.
In the film by the Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, Seydoux captivates, intrigues and spreads an aura of mystery around her. Her character lights a cigarette off a cigarette, leads her suspicious husband by the nose and clearly hides a secret that the viewer, like Jakob, must find out at all costs.
Based on the novel by Milán Füst, the production is a story of obsessive love, lies and suffering that people in love can inflict on each other.
Not afraid of anything
Léa Seydoux is one of the few actresses in the world who can equally convincingly play a Bond girl in an explosive action film and an ambitious role in art cinema. She is not afraid of anything. She was once called the hope of French cinema, but that is the past. Seydoux is now an essential part of it and it is hard to imagine the French moviemaking without her.
In Bond's Spectre and No Time to Die, she played Madeleine Swann – a psychiatrist, an exaggerated villain’s daughter who knows how to handle a gun. In Blue Is the Warmest Colour, scandalous for its daring erotic scenes, she depicted a blue-haired lesbian who helped the teenage heroine find herself and her sexuality.
In Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World, she played the sister of the main character, a playwright who reunites with the family after the years to tell his loved ones about his terminal illness. In Diary of a Chambermaid, she was the cunning maid, and in the somewhat kitschy Beauty and the Beast she was, of course, Beauty, although there is no doubt that she would have played the Beast brilliantly too.
Her filmography includes roles in films by Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun), and there are several more movies starring Seydoux awaiting release. Over the past 18 years, she has starred in nearly 50 productions. And in each, she has proved that European cinema would be considerably poorer if she had become an opera singer, as she had dreamt of as a child.
‘I always felt like an outcast’
She was born in 1985 in Paris into a family of businessman and former actress-turned-philanthropist. Her grandfather owns the famous Pathé film production company. Seydoux's parents separated when she was three years old. In an interview, she recalled that she felt almost like an orphan. ‘I was lonely, lost in the crowd,’ she told El Pais adding that although people seemed to like her at first sight, she always felt like an outcast.
As an 18-year-old, she abandoned her dreams of a career in opera because of her shyness and decided to become an actress. Her parents associated with actors and artists, so Seydoux quickly found her way into the entertainment industry. She debuted in 2006 in the French comedy Mes Copines – about girls who want to win a hip-hop competition.
Just a year later, she starred in The Last Mistress, shown in the Cannes competition – about the toxic relationship between an aristocrat and his lover, and in 2009, she was nominated for the first time – for the César, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for her role as Junie, who tries to find her place in the world after the death of her mother in The Beautiful Person. This was also when she was awarded Female Revelation of the Year at Cannes. Europe was wide open for Seydoux.
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