Isabelle Yasmine Adjani (born June 27, 1955 in Paris' 17th arrondissement) is a César Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated French film actress. She is of German-Algerian parentage, and performs in her native French, English, and German. She has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actress and was awarded the César award four times.
Adjani grew up in Gennevilliers, Hauts-de-Seine to Mohammed Adjani and a German Augusta Gusti. She was drawn to acting at a young age, playing in amateur theater by the age of twelve. As a fourteen-year-old, she appeared in her first motion picture.[citation needed]
She first gained fame as a classical actress for her interpretation of Agnès, the main female role in Molière's L'École des femmes, but soon left the Comédie française she had joined in 1972 to pursue a movie career. After minor roles in several films, she received positive reviews and much public acclaim for her performance in the 1974 film La Gifle (or The Slap)[citation needed]. The following year, she was cast in her first starring role in François Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. which resulted in a nomination for the Best Actress Oscar and offers for rôles in Hollywood films.
In 1981, Adjani received the Cannes Film Festival's best actress award for the Merchant Ivory film Quartet based on the novel by Jean Rhys, and for the horror film Possession. Next year, she received her first César award for Possession, in which she portrays a frustrated woman going mad. In 1983, she won the César, for her depiction of a vengeful woman in the French blockbuster One Deadly Summer.
In 1989, she co-produced and starred in a biopic of the tragic French sculptor Camille Claudel. She received her third César and second Oscar nomination for her role in the film, which was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Following this publicity, she was chosen by People magazine as one of the '50 Most Beautiful People' in the world. Her fourth César win was for the 1994 film Queen Margot, an ensemble epic directed by Patrice Chéreau.
Adjani has two sons: Barnabé Nuytten with Bruno Nuytten, and Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis from her six-year relationship with Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Gabriel-Kane was born in New York City in 1995, several months after her relationship with Day-Lewis ended.
Adjani was also engaged to French composer Jean Michel Jarre, but they broke up publicly in 2004. In 1987, some French media outlets incorrectly reported that she was dying of AIDS, forcing her to appear on television to deny it.
