Julie Delpy - Film Career

Film Career

In 1984, at the age of 14, Delpy was discovered by film director Jean-Luc Godard, who cast her in Détective (1985). Two years later, Delpy starred in the title role in Bertrand Tavernier's La Passion Béatrice (1987). For her performance, Delpy received a César Award Nomination for Most Promising Actress. She used the money she earned to pay for her first trip to New York City. Delpy became an international celebrity after starring in the 1990 film Europa Europa directed by Agnieszka Holland. In the film, she plays a young pro-Nazi who falls in love with the hero, Solomon Perel, not knowing that he is Jewish. She had to speak fluent German for the part.

Following the success Europa Europa, Delpy appeared in several Hollywood and European films, including The Voyager (1991) and The Three Musketeers (1993). In 1993, she was cast by director Krzysztof Kieślowski to play the female lead in Three Colors: White, the second film of Kieślowski's The Three Colors Trilogy. Delpy also appeared briefly in the other two films in the same role. In 1994, she starred opposite Eric Stoltz in Roger Avary's directorial debut Killing Zoe, a cult heist film capturing the Generation X zeitgeist.

Delpy may be best-known internationally for her co-starring role with Ethan Hawke in director Richard Linklater's 1995 film Before Sunrise, for which she has stated she wrote a lot of her own dialogue uncredited. The film received glowing reviews and was considered one of the most significant films of the 1990s' independent film movement. Its success led to the casting of Delpy in the 1997 American film An American Werewolf in Paris.

In late 2001, she appeared alongside comedian Martin Short in the 30-minute film CinéMagique, a theatre-show attraction presented several times daily at Walt Disney Studios Park in Disneyland Resort Paris. Delpy attended the March 2002 opening of the park and the inauguration of the film-based attraction which sees her star as Marguerite—a female actress with whom Short's character, George, falls in love as he stumbles through countless classic movies. CinéMagique won the coveted 2002 Themed Entertainment Association award for "outstanding" themed attraction. Delpy reprised her Before Sunrise character, Céline, with a brief animated appearance in Waking Life (2001), and again in a 2004 sequel, Before Sunset. The later film was well received and earned Delpy, who co-wrote the script, her first Academy Award nomination for Writing Adapted Screenplay. In addition, she has been nominated for César Awards three times.