A fragile creature that cannot be broken is confounding, and this juxtaposition of delicacy and strength renders it freakishly powerful. Isabelle Huppert is so constituted. This is evident from almost every one of the dizzying number of films in which she has appeared. Her aura is incongruously encased in an exceedingly slim frame. Animated by the whirling of an inhuman engine, she provokes awe, disgust, lust, and adoration. She has said that the art of acting requires a peculiar combination of passivity and power, and passive power is precisely what she exudes. It emanates from her with unmistakable and inexplicable force. Huppert is just over five feet tall, and thin in a way that would be grotesque if she were slightly taller. If you held her with your hands on each of her hips, pressing your thumbs down along the slope of her hip bones, you would feel as if you could break her in half. She would look you dead in the eye and invite your violence. It is impossible to identify which combination of her physical characteristics confers beauty — she is slightly too pretty to be plain and not by any conventional standard sexy enough to justify her undeniable physical magnetism. Huppert burns even when she is icy. She always does — every variation of her, in all of the hundreds of films and plays in which she has been serially reincarnated. Some believe that it is an actor’s job to camouflage herself so that the person playing the part seeps entirely into the character and disappears. For some, that is what is meant by “acting.” Huppert thinks otherwise. In all of her roles she is always also herself. This is especially remarkable because of her subtlety, her utter lack of interest in “pulling focus”; she is not always Isabelle Huppert in the way that Al Pacino is always Al Pacino and Vanessa Redgrave is always Vanessa Redgrave. She says that her filmography is a kind of autobiography, which is to say that she has been hundreds of women, and all of them are charged with her electricity, her passive power, her sex and heat and frigidity. 
Annick Huppert, née Beau, gave birth to her fifth child on March 16, 1953 in Paris’ sixteenth arrondissement. She and her husband, Raymond, named their baby Isabelle and raised her in Ville d’Avray, a suburb seven and a half miles from the center of Paris. (It is the setting of the movie Les dimanches de Ville d’Avray, which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1963, as Huppert proudly repeats.) Raymond was a Russian Jew who married a Catholic, and the Hupperts sent all their children to the St. Cloud Gymnasium, a Catholic school which Isabelle attended until she was sixteen years old. (Her parents married directly after the war. She has never spoken publicly about how her father made it through that catastrophe, or how being the daughter of a Jew who survived the Nazi occupation hardened, softened, or in any other way altered her.) Encouraged by her mother to pursue a career in the arts, she enrolled at the Conservatory of Versailles, and then earned a BA in Russian Literature from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales before studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris. Her teachers were Jean-Laurent Cochet and Antoine Vitez, who furnished French cinema with the next generation’s Milky Way, producing stars such as Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, Fabrice Luchini, and of course Huppert. When asked what she learned at the conservatory, Huppert insists she learned nothing at all. She either never absorbed or willfully purged its teachings. She attended the school because it was where young people who wanted a career in theater and film taxied before takeoff. She and her peers took part in the ritual of knocking on the doors of directors they admired looking for work, a rite of passage among young theater students. In this way she won her first film role in 1972. She achieved national recognition five years later as Pomme in The Lacemaker, a tragedy about a shy girl driven insane by her own timidity. For this part she won the BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer. Claude Chabrol, a director whose temperament and philosophy of cinema were preternaturally compatible with hers, cast her as his lead in Violette Nozière in 1978. If a director agrees to work with Huppert, he must be prepared to cede significant freedoms, since her film style is unique and immovable. She changes the ether of the movie. Chabrol didn’t mind: her ether enriched his. The two would go on to make seven movies together. (He died in 2010 while their eighth collaboration was incubating.) Violette Noziere recounts the true, gory tale of a Parisian murderess who, in 1933, poisoned both her parents and incensed all of France. She was the Lizzie Borden of the French petit-bourgeois, only without the acquittal. The film earned Huppert the first of her two best actress awards at Cannes, and is the earliest instance of a stereotypical Huppert part: severe, disturbing, mysterious, riveting, somewhat opaque, and deepened by a feral intelligence. Throughout the 1980s she worked with some of the greatest directors in the world, including Jean-Luc Godard (Every Man for Himself, 1980, and Passion, 1982), Joseph Losey (La Truite, 1982), Diane Kurys (Entre Nous 1983), Andrzej Wajda (The Possessed, 1988), and of course Claude Chabrol (Une Affaire de femmes, 1988). Today Huppert is considered one of the greatest actresses alive, in both theater and film. A.O. Scott has called her the world’s greatest actress, and in The New York Times list of “The 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century,” published in 2020, Huppert came in second behind Denzel Washington. This status was secured over a long and frenetically busy career, but it was cemented most powerfully in 2001 by her unforgettable performance as Erika Kohut in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. She played an emotionally
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence