Béatrice Dalle

Biography

Béatrice Dalle (born 19 December 1964) is a French actress and model. She has appeared in over fifty films and is best known internationally for her debut role in the 1986 film 37°2 le matin (also released as Betty Blue). Béatrice Dalle is renowned for her intense and unconventional roles, often portraying characters that are both provocative and transgressive.

Dalle was born in Brest, Finistère, France, as Béatrice Cabarrou. She grew up in Le Mans with her mother, father, and an older sister. At age 15, Dalle ran away from home to live in Paris. In 1985, she married the painter Jean-François Dalle, whom she divorced in 1988. In 2005, Dalle married an inmate she met while acting in a short film that was being shot in a prison. They divorced in 2015.

Dalle was working as a model when she met filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix. Beineix cast her in the lead role of the 1986 film 37°2 le matin (released in the UK and USA as Betty Blue) which received BAFTA and Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film, and made a star of Dalle.

She went on to appear in a series of major roles in French films, including the 1989 film Chimère, which was entered into the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.

She featured in the 1987 music video for Buster Poindexter's version of "Oh Me Oh My (I'm fool for you Baby)" and in the 1991 music video for "Move to Memphis" by Norwegian band a-ha.

She starred in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth in 1991. In 1997, she was cast in The Blackout, her first film made in the United States.

In 2001, Dalle appeared in the controversial film Trouble Every Day, in which she played a compulsive sexual cannibal. She starred in the 2007 film À l'intérieur, in which she played a cruel psychopath stalking a pregnant woman.

In 1988, Dalle was interviewed by Clive James in "Postcard from Paris" where she said she was tired of Paris and wanted to move to New York.

Dalle has been arrested on several occasions for shoplifting, drug possession and assault. In January 2005, while making a film about prison life in Brest, Dalle met Guenaël Meziani, serving a 12-year prison sentence for assaulting and raping his ex-girlfriend. She married him after 24 one-hour visits, and spoke on his behalf at hearings for his early release. According to a 2015 profile of Dalle, she said the marriage was "a complete disaster" once Meziani was released from prison, and their divorce was apparently finalised in July 2014.

Interviewed on the French TV programme Divan in 2016, Dalle stated that when she used to work in a morgue with her friends, they sold body parts of corpses, and while on acid, they ate a dead man's ear.

Source: Article "Béatrice Dalle" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA.