Irène Jacob

French actress, winner of the Cannes Festival’s Best Actress Award for her dual role in "La Double Vie De Véronique," 1991. Jacob’s exceptional performance drew raves from audiences, and established her as one of the finest French actresses of her generation. Her thoughtful, almost melancholic style of acting, along with her timeless beauty, made her an onscreen representative of European sophistication.

The daughter of a physicist father and a psychologist mother, Jacob’s family moved from Paris to Geneva, Switzerland, when she was three, and she debuted on the stage at age 11. She pursued her drama studies at the both Geneva Conservatoire and the Rue Blanche, the French national drama academy, in Paris. In the late-1980s, she was spotted by director Louis Malle and cast in her first screen role in "Au Revoir Les Enfants," 1987. Despite a flood of offers to star in American films, she spent the decade of the ’90s focusing primarily on small French films. She appeared in an occasional American film, notably 1999’s "The Big Brass Ring," in the role of a journalist on the trail of campaign scandal.