Coline Serreau

Biography: life and films

Coline Serreau probably owes her dazzling range of artistic abilities (as writer, director, actor, dancer and musician) to the fact that her father was the theatre director Jean-Marie Serreau and her mother Geneviève was a writer. She studied literature, music, dance and even took a trapeze course (with Annie Fratellini's École du Cirque) before she entered the hallowed ranks of the Comédie-Française as a trainee after taking drama lessons at the Centre d'Art dramatique in Paris. Not convinced that her future lay in acting, Serreau broadened out and started to work as a script writer and director for the stage, and then cinema in the early 1970s.

Serreau's first screen credit was as co-author of the screenplay of Jean-Louis Bertuccelli's 1974 film On s'est trompé d'histoire d'amour, in which she also appeared. The following year, she showed up on screen in a small part in Jacques Rouffio's Sept morts sur ordonnance (1975) and directed her first feature, a documentary titled Mais qu'est-ce qu'elles veulent?, in which she set out her stall as a committed feminist. Her first fictional feature, Pourquoi pas! (1977), brought together Sami Frey, Mario Gonzales and Christine Murillo in a quirky love triangle comedy. The film was enthusiastically received by the critics and was a promising start to her film directing career. It would be five years before Serreau made her next feature, Qu'est-ce qu'on attend pour être heureux! (1982), another likeable comedy.

Then came the film that made Serreau's name - Trois hommes et un couffin (1985). This offbeat comedy depicting three bachelors (Roland Giraud, Michel Boujenah and André Dussollier) reluctantly discovering the joys of fatherhood when a baby lands on their doormat was a phenomenal success, attracting an audience of over 12 million in France. The film received two Césars in 1986 - for Best Film and Best Screenplay - and was remade in America the following year as Three Men and a Baby, directed by Leonard Nimoy and starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson. Serreau directed a sequel to this film, 18 an après in 2003, but this was nowhere near as successful.

Coline Serreau's next film was also a comedy, this time in the classic rom-com line - Romuald et Juliette (1989) - with Firmine Richard making a stunning screen debut opposite Daniel Auteuil in a fiery romance that transcends both both colour and income bracket. The director won greater praise from the critics for her next film, a timely social comedy entitled La Crise (1992). With a strong lead performance from Vincent Lindon, it's not hard to see why this film attracted almost two and a half million spectators in France. It also won its author a second César for Best Screenplay in 1993. Lindon featured in Serreau's next two films - La Belle verte (1996) and Chaos (2001) - in which the director allowed herself to express her environmental and feminist concerns in a typically humorous vein. Her next film was the pilgrimage comedy Saint-Jacques... La Mecque (2005), an off-kilter variant on the road movie that manages to be funny, poignant and highly original.

In her next film, Solutions locales pour un désordre global (2010), Serreau engages with one of the most challenging problems of our age - how to achieve a sustainable food supply - and comes up with some concrete proposals to save the planet without sending us back to the Stone Age. In her 2014 documentary, Tout est permis, Serreau examines the pros and cons of the driving points system in France. One of France's most highly thought of independent filmmakers, Coline Serreau was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 2004.

Filmography

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