Yolande Moreau

Three César Awards, more than any other Belgian actress has won, and the career began in comic performance rather than at drama school. It shows in everything she does. Her screen work leans on physical comedy and on a face that can hold a scene without a word of dialogue, and she once played a mime on the Eiffel Tower in a Paris Je T'aime segment, which is about as literal as that skill gets.

The filmography splits fairly cleanly. On one side, French comedy and its stranger corners: the bar patronne in The Three Brothers, Tambouille in Micmacs, God's wife in The Brand New Testament, and Madeleine Wallace in Amélie, which is the role most non-French viewers know her for. On the other, dramatic parts nobody would have predicted from the comedy, including La Levaque in Germinal and the servant at the edge of The Childhood of a Leader. One of her earliest credits, the 1985 drama Vagabond, has her playing a character called Yolande.

Two of the Césars are for best actress and one is for best first film, which is the giveaway that she also directs and writes. Around those sit a Lumière, a Magritte, an award from the Los Angeles critics, nominations for two European Film Awards, two Molière Awards for the stage and twelve further Magritte nominations.

Her presence has aged into something unusual. In the later work she is often the still, watchful figure at the side of the frame, and directors now cast her for weight rather than for laughs.