Actor As Artist: Béatrice Dalle | The Great Acting Blog

When an actor is an artist – Béatrice Dalle is our example here.

 

“I’ve done 75 films and they’re all super … because I’ve always worked with auteurs.” … Are you rich? … “Hell, no. I don’t have a car, I don’t own my place, I don’t have a house in the country. But when I look at my career, I know I’m a good actress. I won’t prostitute myself. I absolutely do not criticise prostitutes but I’ve never accepted a role for money.” – Béatrice Dalle, Guardian interview, 2018.

Dalle only does work she believes in. She works with directors she respects, refusing to compromise, declining the expedient or the opportunistic. She is committed to aesthetic truth. We see an actor here making a value judgement about what she wants to put into the world. Operating with purpose and a clear picture of what she wants to do then, Dalle has created a body of work she is passionate about, happy to stand behind all of the films she has done. This is an actor of courage, one who could have made more cash by expending her beliefs, but who chose to take responsibility instead, and define an aesthetic. This is when an actor is an artist.

Even a cursory glance at her filmography reveals the fruits of this purposeful approach. Dalle has worked in a cinema of excellence and provocation, and with some of the finest contemporary directors. It starts with her astonishing debut in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue, playing the title role – delivering one of the most impressive first performances in the history of cinema, creating an acute image of female rebellion along the way. There followed Jacques Doillon’s A Woman’s Revenge, co-leading with Isabelle Huppert, Night On Earth for Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara’s The Black-Out, and three films with Claire Denis. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

One might say that Béatrice Dalle is an outlier, an extreme case – after all, how many actors get to debut by playing the title role in a major motion picture like Betty Blue? For most actors, life is toiling and precarious – surely we must take what we can get? On the surface that would seem perfectly reasonable,  but what are you becoming in the process? Do you believe in the work you send into the world? Imagine what you would have done with an opportunity such as Dalle’s.

In the end, perhaps it is simply more productive to be an artist than a hack – to choose, to define, to discern, to say no, to take responsibility, to commit, to create a culture, to be patient, to refuse compromise, to act in line with your beliefs. The reward for this courage might be the gradual construction of a body of work that provides you with exhilaration in your life.

 

FURTHER READING
Tragic Irony In Betty Blue
Is Acting An Art?
Michel Piccoli On His Work, Directors And How He Chooses Projects

LINKS
Béatrice Dalle interview in The Guardian [2018]