Julie Delpy (; born 21 December 1969) is a French-American actress, filmmaker, composer, and singer-songwriter. She studied filmmaking at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and has directed, written, and acted in more than 30 films, including Europa Europa (1990), Voyager (1991), Three Colours: White (1993), the Before trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), and 2 Days in Paris (2007).
She has been nominated for three César Awards, two Online Film Critics Society Awards, and two Academy Awards. She moved to the United States in 1990 and became a US citizen in 2001.
Family
Delpy was born in Paris, the only child of Albert Delpy, a Vietnamese-born French actor and theater director, 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 mother was played by her real mother and acknowledges 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:
Film career
In 1984, at fourteen, Delpy was discovered by film director Jean-Luc Godard, who cast her in Détective (1985). Two years later she played the title role in Bertrand Tavernier's La Passion Béatrice (1987) 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 pro-Nazi 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 Colors 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). The initial follow-up movie earned Delpy, who co-wrote the script, her first Academy Award nomination 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.