Emmanuelle Seigner

Her career and her private life have been braided together since the late eighties. Seigner played Michelle in Roman Polanski's Frantic in 1988 and married him in 1989, and she has since appeared in a long run of his films: Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate, Venus in Fur, Based on a True Story, An Officer and a Spy. That is an unusual body of work, three decades of collaboration with a director who is also her husband, and it is the elephant in every room she is discussed in.

Taken on their own terms the performances are more varied than the association suggests. She is best at a particular kind of unreadable erotic threat, which is what Bitter Moon and The Ninth Gate both run on, but the Cesar nominations came from elsewhere: supporting nods for Place Vendome and La Vie en Rose, and a Best Actress nomination for Venus in Fur, a two-hander adapted from the stage that requires her to change register mid-sentence and get away with it.

The rest of the French filmography is solid and largely unseen outside France: In the House, Heal the Living, Change of Plans, Madame Ginoux in At Eternity's Gate, and a small sharp part in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. She sings as well, and that is a second career rather than an actor's hobby.