Seven films in fourteen months. Beneath her air of charming exuberance, Virginie Efira is the most Stakhanovist French-speaking actress of the moment. With a César nomination for best actress for her role in See Paris again, by Alice Winocour, proposals to no longer know what to do with, she turns the head of French cinema. She who still filled the holes in the castings ten years ago has become the muse of many authors. ” I no longer see a scenario with a woman between 30 and 45 without Efira written in the margin, assures Philippe Carcassonne, producer of Anne Fontaine’s films My worst nightmare, in 2011, and Police, in 2020, in which she starred.
Fifteen years ago, Virginie Efira was a television host for entertainment shows. Ten years ago, an actress of sympathetic, comforting films. She went in less than a decade, the time of a lightning career, from comparisons with Cameron Diaz or Reese Witherspoon, class of funny actresses, to Gena Rowlands, the most Bergmanian of American actresses.
And the audience follows
Dramas, comedies, Virginie Efira goes everywhere, like Catherine Deneuve, who slipped from Jean-Paul Rappeneau to Luis Buñuel in the 1970s, or Isabelle Huppert, valseuses (1974), by Bertrand Blier, to The Pianist (2001), by Michael Haneke. And the public follows. He runs to see her in the halls. Better still, he loves her, this 45-year-old Belgian actress with a unique screen presence. Comment from a spectator aged forty years heard, this fall in Paris, after a session ofare children of others, by Rebecca Zlotowski: “ Efira is us better. »
“The magic of cinema always works”, eludes Virginie Efira at the mention of this flattering anecdote. This winter morning, big socks and a pilling sweater, she pulls on an electronic cigarette. Pretty by nature, without makeup. Fame seems to be sliding down her round cheeks. “I remain very Belgian, she explains humorously. When I go to the cinema in Les Halles and people smile at me, I want to believe that life is a musical and Paris is a city where everyone seems happy… and only then tell myself that it’s because that I was recognized. »
She lives near the Place de la Bastille with Ali, her 9-year-old daughter (Ali because the boxer Muhammad Ali and Ali MacGraw, the actress of Love Story), and actor Niels Schneider, 35. A reader of Virginia Woolf, she also has a bedroom of her own on the same floor as their apartment.
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