Agnès Jaoui

Agnes Jaoui is an award-winning French actress, writer, and director best known for her collaborations with her husband, Jean-Pierre Bacri. Encouraged by her Tunisian Jewish parents to pursue acting, Jaoui studied drama under Patrice Chereau at Theatre des Amandiers in Nanterre, France. She made her film debut in 1983 with a small role in the action drama "The Hawk," and next appeared in the Anton Chekhov melodrama "Hotel de France." Jaoui, who also trained as a classical singer, spent much of the 1990s appearing in stage productions like "The Birthday Party" and "Cuisine et Dependances," both of which she later adapted to film. It was while performing in these plays that she met fellow actor Jean-Pierre Bacri. They soon married and became a professional and personal team, writing popular comedies such as "Family Resemblance," which reveals an upper-class French family dynamic over the course of one meal, and acting opposite each other in the comedy short "La methode." In 1997 she and Bacri won numerous awards for their screenplay of the Alain Resnais musical "Same Old Song," and a few years later Jaoui wrote, directed and starred in the romantic comedy "The Taste of Others." The film, which received an Academy Award nomination, was a critical and commercial success. She has since directed "Look at Me" and "Parlez-moi de la pluie," and also appeared as a screen idol in "Le role de sa vie" and as a woman who opens her home to Holocaust survivors in "La maison de Nina."