Aurore Clément
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Aurore Clement was born in Soissons, France. Her parents were farmers,
and after the death of her father, she left for Paris where she found
work with a modeling agency. She quickly made a name for herself,
preferring a natural style and refusing to wear make-up. In the
seventies,Louis Malle, searching for a new
face and look, discovered Aurore on the cover of the French magazine
Elle and cast her in the role of France, a young Jewish woman in love
with a collaborator in the controversial
Lacombe, Lucien (1974). She then
met Chantal Akerman and soon became one
of her favorite comedians (from
Meetings with Anna (1978)
in which she plays a lonely movie director traveling all over Europe,
to Tomorrow We Move (2004)
in which she portrays an intrusive and eccentric mother). In 1978
Aurore left for the Philippines to begin filming
Apocalypse Now (1979), by
Francis Ford Coppola, in which she
was cast as the enigmatic and drug-addicted Roxanne who represented the
typical 'femme fatale' for all French former colonists still dreaming
of Indochina. However, the sequence, dubbed the
'Plantation', was
unfortunately cut from the film and not seen again until the release of
the Redux version in 2001. She met her husband, production designer
Dean Tavoularis,
while filming with Coppola. After several movies in Italy
(Mario Monicelli,
Dino Risi,
Elio Petri) Aurore Clement was featured in
two films shown in Cannes the same year. Portraying a loose woman for
Claude Chabrol
(The Hatter's Ghost (1982))
she totally reinvented herself and played a mysterious woman lost in
the rain for Peter Del Monte
"L'invitation au Voyage"). Two years later, she was cast by
Wim Wenders as
Dean Stockwell's wife in
Paris, Texas (1984) which won the
French Cannes Festival Palme d'Or. Excelling in playing both dramatic
and lunatic characters, she reconnected with the
'cinéma d'auteur', notably in Anne-Marie Miéville's
Nous sommes tous encore ici (1997)
in which she played the wife of Jean Luc Godard; in
Laetitia Masson's distressing world
(For Sale (1998) ,
Only You (1994),
La repentie (2002)), and in
Serge Gainsbourg's nefarious and
ultimate film,
Stan the Flasher (1990). Aurore
appeared also in well received and widely distributed movies such as
Tanguy (2001),
Bon Voyage (2003), and
Jet Set (2000) before being directed
again by Claude Chabrol as a cute hairdresser
(The Bridesmaid (2004))
and by Sofia Coppola as the Duchess de
Chartres in
Marie Antoinette (2006). She has
also been cast in numerous high quality films made for television such
as
Une péniche nommée 'Réalité' (1985)
directed by Paul Seban (1982) in which she
reconnects with her farming routes;
Deux amies d'enfance (1983)
with Ludmila Mikaël, directed by
Nina Companeez (1983); "Quidam" (1984) in
which director Gérard Marx casts her against type;
Le regard dans le miroir (1985)
directed by Jean Chapot (1985), in which she
portrays a former camp survivor next to
Bruno Cremer and
Michel Bouquet;
Les Alsaciens: ou les deux Mathilde (1996),
directed by Michel Favart, a film shown in
two parts in which she plays a woman struggling and suffering
throughout two world wars and "Maigret et le corps sans tête" (1991) in
which she offers a stunning performance as a bar keeper in the
mid-fifties rural France. She has also been recently seen in the series
Zodiaque (2004) and
Zodiaque (2004).
In addition to her film and television careers, Aurore has been a
successful stage actress having first been seen in "La Vie singulière
d'Albert Nobbs" (1988), directed by
Simone Benmussa in which she portrays a
young woman forced to disguise herself as a man in order to make a
living in Victorian England. For this premiere on stage, she won an
acting prize given by the French theater critics association. Ms.
Clement was also seen in Anton Chekhov's
"La Mouette", Marguerite Duras' "Les
Eaux et Forets" and
Alexandre Dumas fils' "La Dame aux
Camelias", alongside Isabelle Adjani,
for which she has been nominated for the Molieres (the equivalent of
the American Tony's).
