Ariane Ascaride Biography, Family, Career

Ariane Ascaride has aged wonderfully and in her mature age she has surely signed her best works. A very natural actress, hers are uncomplicated characters, innocent women, dreamers, sufferers, housewives, mothers, grandmothers, who live everyday stories, sometimes tragic but always realistic, deeply human, pieces of life that we could live any of us That’s why she always softens and convinces.

Ariane Ascaride was born in Marseille on October 10, 1954. The daughter of a French office worker and an artist representative of Italian origin, Ariane has two brothers, who have also dedicated themselves to creative disciplines: Pierre, a film director, and Gilles, a writer. She studied Sociology at the University of Aix-en-Provence, where she met the man who would change her life, Robert Guédiguian.

The family heritage must have been very strong because Ariane immediately took the steps to become an actress, completing her studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur D’art Dramatique, graduating in 1979. Before that, she had already appeared in a couple of films, Antoine Vitez s’amuse avec Claudel et Brecht (1976) and La communion solennelle (1977).

In 1975 Ariane Ascaride married Robert Guédiguian , who precisely signed his wife to star in his first film, Last Summer(1981). Since then, not only the personal life of both, but also their work dedication has always gone hand in hand. Except for a few rare exceptions, Ascaride has worked in all of her husband’s films, which adds up to almost twenty. Both are perfectly matched and share the communist ideology, somewhat utopian perhaps but certainly committed, with a marked solidarity accent that looks at people with tenderness. This approach, with more or less intensity depending on the plots, is a constant in Guédiguian’s filmography, which tends to focus his scripts on the working class of Marseille. The actress is a member of the committee of the French Coalition for the Culture of Peace and Nonviolence.

Among Ascaride’s most famous films are Marius and Jeannette (1990), for which the actress won the Cesar for Best French Film. Also noteworthy is De todo corazón (1998), about a case of rape; The city is quiet (2000), a dark story about Marseillaises; The snows of Kilimanjaro (2011), perhaps the best film of the couple; A crazy story (2015), which deals dramatically with the Armenian Holocaust; and The House by the Sea (2017), a family portrait.

But not all of Ariane Ascaride’s work has been with Guédiguian. What’s more, many of her best films are selected works, here and there, films that are generally small and sensitive, but that narrate profound issues. There we have, for example , The Hedgehog (2009) and The Delicacy (2011), which adapt two novels by Muriel Barbery and David Foenkinos , where the actress has supporting roles. He also stood out in the romantic Bordadoras (2004) and truly remarkable is his work in the magnificent The history teacher (2014), based on a true story, where he gives life to a teacher at a high school who proposes an important change in mentality. of his students.