Irène Jacob

Irène Jacob — Biography

Born in Suresnes on 15 July 1966 to physicist Maurice Jacob and a psychologist mother, Irène Jacob was the youngest of four children and moved with her family to Geneva at age three; drawn to acting after watching Charlie Chaplin's films, she made her stage debut at eleven. After training at the Geneva Conservatory and London's Drama Studio, she settled in Paris in 1984 to study at the Rue Blanche drama school, and while still a student landed her first film role as a piano teacher in Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987). Her dual role in Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique (1991) won her the Best Actress award at Cannes; she turned down the ensuing wave of Hollywood offers, including the lead in Indecent Proposal, to keep working on smaller French films. Kieślowski's Three Colours: Red (1994) brought her wider international recognition and a BAFTA nomination alongside two César nominations, after which she took nine months away from public life to read. Between 1995 and 1999 she appeared in American and European films including Othello, Beyond the Clouds and U.S. Marshals, before returning to the stage in 2000 opposite Macaulay Culkin in Madame Melville in London's West End. She joined The Affair in 2016, performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018, and published the book Big Bang in 2019. She has stayed active into the 2020s with roles in Liaison (2023) and Maigret in Society (2026).