A Face That Tells the Story

A Face That Tells the Story

The Swiss-born actress Irene Jacob has a remarkable ability to express her characters' emotional upheavals with very few words

By Kristine McKenna
Los Angeles Times, 1994

If you saw Krzysztof Kieslowski's new film, "Red," and fell in love with actress Irene Jacob - it's hard to imagine anyone seeing the film and not being enchanted by her - you'll be happy to hear that off-screen, the 28-year-old actress is a lot like Valentine, her character in the film. Radiantly beautiful, of course - anybody can see that like Valentine, Jacob is a knockout. But the subtler qualities that illuminate Jacob's character in the film - her modesty, her thoughtfulness and sensitivity - are part of Jacob as well.
Most memorably seen in Kieslowski's 1991 film "The Double Life of Veronique" (for which she won that year's best actress award at Cannes), the Swiss-born Jacob comes across during an interview in a Westwood hotel as an empathetic woman of great intelligence. It's not surprising to learn that her favorite actresses are Gena Rowlands, Giulietta Masina and Ingrid Bergman - Jacob has a luminous grace evocative of those stellar women.

Jacob was born in Geneva in 1966, the youngest child and only girl among four children. Her father was a physicist, her mother a psychologist, and Jacob says she was raised in a Protestant family that "had a revolution."
"My family was very shy with feelings and never spoke about them, but we evolved a little bit. I think part of the reason I was attracted to theater was because I wanted to be close to stories because they could help me relate to my family."
Jacob's interest in performing was ignited when she was 12 and saw the films of Charlie Chaplin. "They took my heart," she recalls. "They made me laugh and cry, and that was exactly what I was waiting for in a film, to awaken me to my feelings."
In 1984 Jacob earned the equivalent of a two-year college degree in languages (she speaks English, German, Italian and French); then, at the age of 18, she moved to Paris.
"I moved to Paris because I wanted to live in an artistic environment where I could express myself and argue, and I couldn't find this in Switzerland.
"I arrived there and it was very lonely for me, despite the fact that my brother who's a musician was also living there [her other two brothers are scientists]. I got a job selling things like dictionaries over the phone and enrolled full time at a national drama school. This school was free if you passed the audition, which I fortunately did."
Three years after her arrival in Paris, Jacob was cast in "Au Revoir, Les Enfants," and her career has been roaring along at full throttle ever since. After wrapping "Red" in 1993, she took nine months off and did a lot of reading (Tolstoy, Balzac, Singer and several autobiographies), but since that break she has completed two more films.
Last spring, she completed "All Men Are Mortal," an adaptation of the novel by Simone de Beauvoir, which was shot in Budapest and also stars Stephen Rea.
"He's a wonderful actor," she says of Rea. "He's really very shy, but we had a lovely time - he's quite generous as a partner.
"I play an ambitious actress who's never satisfied," she says of the film. "One day she meets this man in the street who's a bum and they have a romance. It so happens that this man is immortal - but he, too, is ultimately mortal inside, in that his capacity to love has limits. De Beauvoir wrote this book just after World War II and in a sense it was about the survivors of the war who were unable to reinvolve themselves in life."
From Budapest, Jacob went directly to the Berlin set of "Victory," an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story directed by Mark Peploe, for release next summer.
"It's set at the beginning of the century and I play a violinist in an all-girl orchestra in the Far East," says Jacob of the film, which also stars Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill.
"This girl falls in love with the character played by Willem Dafoe, who is a very difficult man unwilling to open himself to love. She has a very sad life, yet she still has trust, and this is often the case with our heroes. Tolstoy said that heroes are those who fight against inner death - which is to stop believing in love and trust."
Jacob will soon head for the south of France to shoot a sequence in "Beyond the Clouds," a film composed of five short stories that will be co-directed by Wim Wenders and Michelangelo Antonioni. Based on an idea by Antonioni, the script was co-written by both directors. From there, she'll head for the set of a film directed by Trintignant's ex-wife, Nadine Trintignant, which stars his daughter, Marie.

Somewhere along the way, she hopes she'll have a minute to see her family, to whom she remains close.
"Not too long ago I went to see my grandparents and I was very sad that day because of a separation," she recalls. "As I was leaving, my grandfather said, 'Goodby, Irene - you will find more pain!' He thought this was the most reassuring thing he could say to me, and I laughed despite how sad I was feeling.
"It's funny, you can be deep in serious thought one minute, and laughing the next, and this is something I try to remember in my work," she says. "I always try to touch these two things; our lightness of being which is sometimes unbearable, and our depth which is surprising and admirable."