Marlène Jobert

Origins and early life

Marlène Jobert was born in Algiers on 4 November 1940, the eldest of five children of Éliane Azulay, who came from a Sephardi Jewish family long settled at Birkhadem in the hills above the city, and of Charles Jobert, a Catholic postal official; the family left Algeria for France in 1962.

Work and career

She trained at the Conservatoire in Paris and was cast by Jean-Luc Godard in Masculin féminin in 1966, the red-haired provincial whose flat delivery cut through the film's talk. She became one of the most bankable French actresses of her generation, opposite Charles Bronson in Le Passager de la pluie in 1970, and in Les Mariés de l'an II, L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune and La Guerre des polices.

She has spoken publicly of the Jewish family she grew up in, of a childhood of few means in Algiers and of arriving in France with nothing, and she has lent her name to the Jewish community's charitable appeals. From 1988 she left the screen almost entirely for a second career as an author of illustrated musical tales for children, narrated in her own voice, of which more than twenty million copies have been sold in France. She is the mother of the actress Eva Green and of Joy Green.