Isabelle Huppert

Born: March 16 1955
Where: Paris, France

The actress - who had appeared in more than 15 films by the time she was 21 - is probably best known to modern audiences for the sado-masochistic Piano Teacher.

She made her screen debut at age 16 and went on to play a bored teenager who runs off with the vagabond threesome in Bertrand Blier's road movie Going Places.

Her roles as the guileless, victimized main character of Claude Goretta's The Lacemaker and as the casual murderess Violette Noziere, demonstrated an enviable dramatic range and propelled her into international stardom.

In the early 1980s, Huppert earned a reputation for using her influence to help non-commercial projects get off the ground.

Such films included Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself, Joseph Losey's The Trout and sister Caroline Huppert's Sincerely, Charlotte.

Huppert has continued to work with non-mainstream directors such as Diane Kurys (Entre Nous), as well as established international figures such as Claude Chabrol.

Raised as the youngest of five daughters in an affluent family, Huppert announced at age 13 her intention to be an actor.

By 1971, she had played her first screen role in Nina Companeez's Faustine et le Bel Ete and made her English-language debut in Otto Preminger's Rosebud.

Her decidedly different turn as a simple provincial heroine, a country girl ruined by a summer romance, in The Lacemaker won her a BAFTA award.

The following year, Huppert earned the Best Actress honours at Cannes for her effective portrayal of Violette.

The actress found herself in the midst of controversy in 1979 when Michael Cimino insisted on casting her as the female lead in Heaven's Gate.

It was one of the earlier uproars between the director and the studio in what proved to be one of the biggest box office disasters in Hollywood history.

One of her more intriguing roles was as a former nun writing pornography in Hal Hartley's Amateur.

Huppert has not sought work on TV, but did do the voice of the mistress heard by Ted Danson in the miniseries version of Gulliver's Travels.

She continued to act steadily in French films for several years, appearing in La Vie Moderne, La Fausse Suivante, based on Marivaux's play and Les Destinees Sentimentales.

In 2002, she appeared in 8 Femmes with Catherine Deneuve and also received a fair amount of attention in the US with the release of the crime thriller Merci Pour Le Chocolat.

Next came Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, in which she played a sexually alienated music intructor who embarks on a dark journey into sado-masichism.

She re-teamed with Haneke to make the critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic Time Of The Wolf with Beatrice Dalle and Olivier Gourmet.

Recent works includes I Heart Huckabees, the philosophical comedy also starring Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Mark Wahlberg and directed by David O Russell.