Julie Delpy

Family

Delpy was born in Paris, the only child of Albert Delpy, a French actor and theater director born in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam), and Marie Pillet, a French actress in feature films and the avant-garde theater. Her mother was also known for signing the 1971 Manifesto of the 343, signed by women demanding reproductive rights and admitting to having abortions when they were illegal in France. In Delpy's 2007 film 2 Days in Paris, her character's parents were played by her real parents and the mother acknowledged signing the manifesto, mirroring her real life. Pillet died in 2009.

Julie's parents exposed her to the arts at an early age. She said:

Career

Acting

In 1984, at fourteen, Delpy was discovered by film director Jean-Luc Godard, who cast her in Détective (1985). In 1986, she appeared in Léos Carax's Mauvais Sang. In 1987 she played the title role in Bertrand Tavernier's La Passion Béatrice and was nominated for a César Award for Most Promising Actress. She used her money from the film to pay for her first trip to New York City.

Delpy became an international celebrity after starring in the 1990 film Europa Europa directed by Agnieszka Holland. In the film, she plays a young Hitler Youth member who falls in love with the hero, Solomon Perel, not knowing he is Jewish. She did not speak German, so she performed her role in English and her dialogue was dubbed in.

Delpy subsequently appeared in several Hollywood and European films, including Voyager (1991) and The Three Musketeers (1993). In 1993, she was cast by director Krzysztof Kieślowski for the female lead in Three Colours: White, the second film in Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy. She also appeared briefly in the other two films - Blue and Red - in the same role. That year, she also appeared with Brendan Fraser and Donald Sutherland in the Percy Adlon feature Younger and Younger. In 1994, she starred with Eric Stoltz in Roger Avary's directorial debut Killing Zoe, a cult heist film capturing the Generation X zeitgeist. She achieved wider recognition for her role opposite Ethan Hawke in director Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995). It received glowing reviews and was considered one of the most significant films of the '90s independent film movement. Its success led to Delpy's casting in the 1997 American film An American Werewolf in Paris.

She reprised her Before Sunrise character, Céline, with a brief animated appearance in Waking Life (2001), and again in the sequels Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). Both follow-up movies earned Delpy, who co-wrote the scripts, Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In late 2001, she appeared alongside comedian Martin Short in the 30-minute short film CinéMagique, a theatre-show attraction presented several times daily at Walt Disney Studios Park in Disneyland Paris. She attended the park's March 2002 opening and the inauguration of the film-based attraction, where she starred as Marguerite - a female actress with whom Short's character, George, falls in love as he stumbles through countless classic movies. CinéMagique won the 2002 Themed Entertainment Association award for Outstanding Themed Attraction.

In 2009, Delpy starred in The Countess as the title character Elizabeth Báthory. Her third film as a director, it also starred Daniel Brühl and William Hurt.

Writing and directing

Delpy began being interested in a film-directing career when still a child, and enrolled in a summer directing course at New York University. She wrote and directed the short film Blah Blah Blah in 1995 which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004, she co-wrote Before Sunset, a sequel to the 1995 movie Before Sunrise, with director Richard Linklater and co-star Ethan Hawke. Describing the experience, she said, "I'm not a feminist wearing overalls and hating the male gender. But I'm a definite feminist. I don't want to make Before Sunset into a little male fantasy, ever." She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for her work on the film.

She made her feature length directorial debut in 2002 with Looking for Jimmy, which she also wrote and produced. In 2007 she directed, wrote, edited, and co-produced the original score for 2 Days in Paris, co-starring Adam Goldberg. It also features Delpy's real-life parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy, as her character's parents.

In 2011 she wrote and directed Le Skylab, which received a theatrical release in France but failed to find distribution in the U.S. In 2012 she released 2 Days in New York, a sequel to her 2007 film 2 Days in Paris, starring Delpy and actor Chris Rock in a role she said she wrote specifically for him. In 2013, she reunited with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke to write Before Midnight, the sequel to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. She again starred with Hawke, and the film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. It screened out of competition at the Berlin International Film Festival and was released in May 2013. Delpy, Linklater and Hawke were later nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Responding to criticism of the film's nudity, Delpy said in interview with GQ Magazine:

Some people were like, 'It's not feminist. You're showing your tits and he's not showing his ass.' [But] isn't it the people who are hiding women behind layers of clothes who are the misogynists? I'm a real person, so it's a statement to say, 'Alright, I'm a forty year-old woman, and this is what you get with no plastic surgery.'

Lolo was Delpy's second French-language feature film, and the first she'd directed since 2 Days in New York. She was also slated to write and direct the HBO movie Cancer Vixen, starring Cate Blanchett as Marisa Acocella Marchetto, a cartoonist for The New Yorker who is diagnosed with cancer. The project has yet to materialize as of 2020. In early 2014, Delpy announced her next writing-directing project would be A Dazzling Display of Splendor and focus on a family of vaudeville performers. It has also failed to enter production as of 2020.

Delpy courted controversy in 2016 when the Oscar nominations included no Black honorees. "Two years ago, I said something about the Academy being very white male, which is the reality, and I was slashed to pieces by the media ... It's funny—women can't talk. I sometimes wish I were African-American because people don't bash them afterward." She later apologized for the comment.

Music

Delpy is also a musical artist. Three tracks from her 2003 album Julie Delpy - "A Waltz for a Night", "An Ocean apart", and "Je t'aime tant" - were featured in Before Sunset. She composed the original score for 2 Days in Paris in which she performed Marc Collin's "Lalala" over the closing credits. She also wrote the music for her 2009 film The Countess.

Personal life

Delpy moved to New York in 1990, then to Los Angeles a few years later. She has been a naturalized US citizen since 2001 although she also retains her French citizenship. She divides her time between Paris and Los Angeles. From 2007 to 2012 she was in a relationship with German film composer Marc Streitenfeld. Their son was born in January 2009.

In 2015 she married Dimitris Birbilis.

Delpy has expressed her commitment to correcting inaccurate assumptions regarding feminism, telling IndieWire "I'm very dedicated to feminism [but] even if I'm a feminist, I don't think all women are perfect. If we're equal to men, we are also imperfect like men ... [Some men] try to say [feminists] think that women are better than men, and I want to tell them, 'no'". In a 2007 interview with Jan Lisa Huttner, she said, "I was raised by a feminist, so I'm not a feminist. I don't need to be. I’m equal to men. I have no issues with the idea that I'm the same as a man. I have my differences; I have breasts, and different plumbing, different stuff down there. But outside of this, my consciousness, my capacity at creating, my capacity at doing things is the same as a man". However, in a 2012 interview with Emily Greenhouse in The New Yorker, she said, "You know, I've been raised by feminists, and I'm such a feminist, there's no way I'm not going to be feminist, because my core is so deeply feminist that I can even make sexist comments about women, and I feel still a feminist".

Delpy has said she has been plagued by health problems since childhood and had to wear callipers at age eight. She also occasionally experiences migraines and panic-attacks.

In 2022, Delpy was an honoree by the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Great Immigrant Award.

Filmography

As actress

As filmmaker

Awards and nominations

References

References

1. Hal Erickson. (2008). "Julie Delpy Biography". [[The New York Times]].
2. "Julie Delpy Movie and Career Information".
3. Kieslowski, Krzysztof. ''Kieslowski on Kieslowski''. Edited by Danusia Stok. London: Faber and Faber, 1998, p. 212.
4. Insdorf, Annette. ''Double Lives, Second Chances: the Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski''. New York: Hyperion, 1999, pp. 153-165.
5. Goupil, Hélène. "The Zen of Julie Delpy". France Today.
6. (27 January 1995). "Before Sunrise Movie Reviews, Pictures – Rotten Tomatoes".
7. Puig, Claudia. "Julie Delpy's '2 Days' has its moments". [[USA Today]].
8. [http://www.contactmusic.com/news-article/delpy.-feminist-and-proud Delpy: Feminist And Proud.] {{Webarchive. link. (1 March 2014 Contact Music.com, 23 July 2004. Accessed 13 March 2013.)
9. "Julie Delpy Biography (1969-)". Full Issue.
10. (7 October 2014). "2014". Oscars.org - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
11. (April 19, 2013). "Julie Delpy Explains Before Midnight, Feminism, and Onscreen Nudity".
12. Goldberg, Lesley. (12 March 2013). "Cate Blanchett Developing 'Cancer Vixen' at HBO". [[The Hollywood Reporter]].
13. (4 February 2014). "Worldview to Finance Julie Delpy's 'A Dazzling Display of Splendor'". [[Variety (magazine).
14. (22 January 2016). "Julie Delpy Says Hollywood Dumps on Women Most: 'I Sometimes Wish I Were African American' (Video)". Thewrap.
15. "Julie Delpy sorry for Hollywood diversity comments".
16. "Interview: Julie Delpy".
17. "Julie Delpy: 'I Love Everything About Motherhood".
18. "Steven Spielberg, Julie Delpy, Virtual Reality, The Film Programme - BBC Radio 4".
19. (16 September 2015). "Interview: Julie Delpy On Sociopaths, Feminists, 'Lolo' And Whether She Could Handle A Big Studio Film".
20. "Julie Delpy, Actress/Filmmaker".
21. Greenhouse, Emily. (2012-08-10). "Hello, Julie Delpy".
22. "Julie Delpy".
23. Candid. "Carnegie Corporation names 2022 cohort of distinguished immigrants".
24. Guthmann, Edward. (4 November 2004). "Julie Delpy is bursting with feeling, full of words — and all that is propelling her beyond the screen". [[Hearst Newspapers.