Miou-Miou

Sylvette Herry has worked under the name Miou-Miou for her entire screen career, which now runs past fifty years and shows no sign of stopping: there are credits here dated 2026. She won the Cesar Award for Best Actress for Memoirs of a French Whore, and she has been nominated ten times.

The early films are the provocative ones. Bertrand Blier's Going Places is the notorious entry, a road movie designed to offend, and The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob is the broad farce running alongside it. What she brought to both, and to everything since, is a face that registers exasperation faster than anyone else in French cinema. She is superb at playing women who are done being reasonable and have decided to say so.

The filmography then becomes a decent map of postwar French film itself, because she kept working with the directors who defined it: Blier, Berri, Deray, Leconte, Losey, Malle, and later Michel Gondry. The films line up accordingly, from Entre Nous and Ménage through May Fools to Germinal, where she plays La Maheude in a mining epic that handed her one of her hardest roles, and on to The Science of Sleep. This Sweet Sickness and Dry Cleaning are not among the credits listed here.

The recent run is comedy-leaning and prolific: Populaire, The Concert, In Safe Hands, Dumped, the Jean-Claude Van Damme farce The Last Mercenary, and the courtroom drama All Your Faces. She has become the actress French films call when a scene needs an adult in it.