Emmanuelle Béart

Origins and early life

Emmanuelle Béart was born in Gassin, near Saint-Tropez, on 14 August 1963, the daughter of the singer Guy Béart and of the model and actress Geneviève Galéa. Her father was born Guy Béhar-Hasson in Cairo in 1930, the son of David Béhar-Hasson, an accountant, and of Amélia Taral, both Sephardic Jews of the French-speaking Jewish community of Egypt, whose name goes back to the town of Béjar in Castile — and it is through those two paternal grandparents, documented by the French Wikipedia, by the Encyclopædia Universalis and by the Revue française de généalogie, that she has her place in this directory; she was raised without religion, and this fiche claims nothing more than the ancestry.

She grew up in the countryside of the Var and trained at the Cours Florent, and became famous at twenty-three as the shepherdess of Claude Berri's Manon des Sources, in 1986, which won her the César for best supporting actress.

Work and career

She then became one of the great actresses of French cinema: the model in Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse in 1991, the violinist of Claude Sautet's Un cœur en hiver in 1992 and the young woman of his Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud in 1995, Olivier Assayas's Les Destinées sentimentales in 2000 and François Ozon's 8 femmes in 2002, as well as Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible in Hollywood. Ambassador for UNICEF since 1996, she stood that year with the undocumented immigrants who occupied the church of Saint-Bernard in Paris, and in 2023 she spoke publicly, in a documentary she co-directed, of the incest she suffered as a child.