Isabelle Huppert

More than 120 features, most of them in the lead, and a face that has refused to explain itself for fifty years. Huppert is the central figure of modern French screen acting, and the reason is easy to state and very hard to imitate: she plays people who have already decided, and she declines to show you the deciding.

The method shows most clearly in the collaborations. She worked repeatedly with Claude Chabrol, whose cool, bourgeois crime films are built for exactly her flatness, in Violette Noziere, La Ceremonie, Madame Bovary and Comedy of Power. With Michael Haneke she made The Piano Teacher, then Amour, then Happy End, three films that treat control as a form of violence. She has also worked with Jean-Luc Godard, and with directors across Italy, Russia, central Europe and Asia, which is unusual for a French star of her standing and entirely deliberate.

The English-language work runs from Heaven's Gate in 1980 through I Heart Huckabees and Dead Man Down to Greta, where she plays camp menace with total commitment and no apology. Elle in 2016 brought the largest international audience of her later career.

Her accolades include Best Actress at Cannes, the Cesar for Best Actress, a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a drama, an Independent Spirit Award, an Honorary Golden Bear and the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. She is also, and this is the part that keeps mattering, still working at the same rate she always has, with recent work in La Syndicaliste and The Richest Woman in the World and a comic turn in The Crime Is Mine.