Aurore Clément

Biography

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 The Meetings of Anna (1978) in which she plays a lonely movie director traveling all over Europe, to Demain on déménage (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 (La demoiselle d'honneur (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 Le maître du Zodiaque (2006). 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).