More handsome than beautiful, versatile Annie Girardot was the most popular female star in France during the 1970s. Girardot typically played strong-willed, independent, hard-working, and often lonely women, imbuing her characters with an earthiness and reality that endeared her with women undergoing similar daily struggles. It is small wonder, then, that Girardot became one of the symbols of the early-'70s feminist movement in France — though in personal life Girardot was not terribly involved with feminists.
Girardot made her professional debut with the distinguished Comedie-Francaise theater troupe in 1954 after she graduated with honors from the Conservatoire de Paris. She remained with the troupe through 1957, occasionally taking time off to perform on radio, television, and in Parisian nightclubs. She made an inauspicious film debut in Trieze a Table in 1955. In early roles, Girardot was typically cast as doomed women of dubious origins in dark films, but she didn't make much impact until she played Nadia, a prostitute whom meets a tragic end in Luchino Visconti's Rocco et Ses Freres (Rocco and His Brothers) (1960). During filming she became romantically linked with co-star Renato Salvatori, who played the character who stabbed her character 13 times. They married, but divorced many years later.…  » Read more