Celebrity Biographies
Richie Lawrence
His deep blue eyes fill the screen. Although for a few years Nicolas Sarkozy’s sister-in-law has been talked about more for her controversial behavior than for strictly cinematographic reasons, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi has attracted attention as a talented actress and director.
Born in Turin on November 16, 1964, into a wealthy family, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is the older sister of the model and former First Lady of France Carla Bruni . They had another brother, Virginio, who died of cancer in 2006. Her father, Alberto Bruni, was a renowned pianist and classical music composer, heir to a million-dollar tire company. He used to associate with distinguished representatives of Culture, such as the filmmaker Luchino Visconti , who frequently attended the parties that he organized in his castle, full of paintings and antiques. “I remember my father telling us not to damage the works of art,” recalled Carla Bruni . “No tennis in the living room.”
When in the 1970s the Red Brigades caused a wave of real terror in Italy, threatening to kidnap members of the Italian gentry, the clan had to leave the country to settle in Paris.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi studied Dramatic Art at the Ecole des Amandiers, in Nanterre, where she was taught by the prestigious filmmaker Patrice Chéreau . This gave her her first major film role, as the female lead in Hôtel de France , in whose cast there were also other schoolmates. Chereau would recover it again in two very different films, the historical Queen Margot and the drama Those who love me will catch the train .
She was the wife of a journalist in the pretentious The Man Who Lost His Shadow , by Alain Tanner , where she was accompanied by the Spanish Francisco Rabal and Ángela Molina . Veteran Claude Chabrol recruited her to play a police officer, in In the Heart of the Lie , and she was involved in two films about crisis couples, Five Times Two , by François Ozon , and Un couple parfait , by Nobuhiro Suwa . Even Steven Spielberg himself was interested in her, to give her a small role in Munich .
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi made her directorial debut with It’s easier for a camel… , an acceptable melodrama in which she also plays the protagonist, an upper-class woman with vital problems with her boyfriend. The film is not only full of autobiographical elements, but the director herself seems to be playing herself, while her mother, Marisa Bruni Tedeschi, also assumes this role in the fiction. A few years later, she has directed Actresses –about an interpreter from the 40s who prepares the premiere of a play– and Un château en Italie , again with her mother and inspired by her own memories.
She has been more discreet with her private life than her sister Carla, although she has had many romances, just like her. She seemed to have found some stability with the actor Louis Garrel (leader of Dreamers , by Bernardo Bertolucci ) with whom Valeria Bruni Tedeschi adopted Celine, an African girl, but finally broke up with him in 2012. When Carla married Nicolas Sarkozy, president from France, Valeria did not stop getting her brother-in-law into trouble, especially with the commotion caused by the actress when she decided to visit Marina Petrella, a former terrorist from the Red Brigades, who was on a hunger strike, which generated enormous stir in France.