Actress and director Agnès Jaoui will receive an honorary César rewarding her entire career, the Académie des Césars announced in a press release on Friday January 19. The award will be presented to him during the 49th ceremony which is scheduled to take place on February 23.
This prize will reward a “complete artist” with a forty-year career, with five feature films to direct, including The Taste of Others (2000), which won the César for best film and best screenplay. She also has around fifty roles on screen (Smoking/No Smoking and We Know the Song by Alain Resnais, Un air de famille by Cédric Klapisch…).
“It was in the theater, in 1987, that her career really took off and was forever marked: there she met a certain Jean-Pierre Bacri. A true creative fusion takes place between them, giving birth to numerous successful plays and films,” underlines the Académie des Césars in its press release.
They were one of the most famous couples in cinema, and remained close after their separation, until the actor’s death in 2021.
The most awarded female artist at the Césars
Committed, she spoke out in 2020 against sexism and misogyny, recounting having been “abused around five years old by a stranger in the stairwell of [her] building”, then at 11 years old by her uncle.
Agnès Jaoui is “the female artist most awarded at the Césars, with six statuettes”, underlines the press release. She has never stopped filming and will still be showing on Wednesday in a comedy, The Last of the Jews.
The César nominations are due to be revealed on Wednesday January 24. The film Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or in May, is the favorite.
Members of the academy will have one month to vote, before the ceremony takes place on February 23 at the Olympia, chaired by Valérie Lemercier. The evening, often the occasion for political or social demands, will also be a baptism of fire for the new Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati.