Rise to Fame
Director Olivier Dahan cast her in La Vie en Rose based on a photograph alone, saying her eyes looked like Piaf's before he'd ever met her in person. She'd already spent a decade in French cinema, including a César nomination for Taxi (1998), but nothing prepared anyone for what she did with Piaf. Cotillard played the singer from her teens through her death at 47, winning an Oscar, a César, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe for the same role, making her the only actor to win an Academy Award for a French-language performance. Not bad for a movie Hollywood could have quietly ignored.
In the Spotlight
Two decades after La Vie en Rose, she's still the one European actress Hollywood keeps calling back. The Ice Tower won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at Berlin in 2025, and The Morning Show signed her for season 4. A WWII film with Tom Cruise is in development (Broadsword). The interesting part is how openly she dislikes the celebrity side of things: she has compared her public image to a cursed camera's distorted reflections, and said her activism gets dismissed because she's too famous to have opinions. The work holds up. The persona she built around it, less so.
Side Notes
Both parents were theater performers; her father directed, her mother taught drama, and her stage debut was in a play her father wrote. The Piaf connection runs deeper than La Vie en Rose: three separate films across her career, including Love Me If You Dare and Inception, coincidentally feature Piaf songs. In 2008, she had to publicly walk back on-air comments questioning why the Twin Towers fell. She called the remarks 'totally stupid' years later, which is one way to deal with a 9/11 conspiracy moment.