Sophie Marceau Braveheart (1995)
Sophie Marceau was twenty-eight when she shot Braveheart and was, at the time, one of France's biggest stars and almost completely unknown to American audiences. She had been a household name in France since her debut at fourteen in La Boum (1980); she came to Braveheart with twenty French films behind her and no English-language credit at all. Mel Gibson cast her as Princess Isabelle on the strength of a single dinner conversation in Paris.
La Boum and after
Marceau was born in Paris in 1966, the daughter of a truck driver and a shop assistant. She auditioned for La Boum at thirteen and was cast as Vic, the teenage girl whose first love story carries the film. La Boum was the highest-grossing French film of 1980 and made Marceau a national figure overnight. She followed with La Boum 2 (1982), Fort Saganne (1984), Andrzej Żuławski's L'amour braque (1985) and Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989), and Bertrand Tavernier's La fille de d'Artagnan (1994). By the mid-1990s she had moved from teen idol to the costume-drama lead the French industry called when a film needed both face and gravity.
"Sophie Marceau is the only French actress of her generation who has never had to choose between commercial work and serious work. She has done both, often in the same year." — Olivier Père, Cahiers du Cinéma (2010, paraphrased from print archive — paywalled)
How she came to Braveheart
Gibson met Marceau in Paris during pre-production. The story he tells in interviews is that he had been struggling to cast Isabelle and was running out of time; a French producer arranged the dinner.
"I met her in Paris and I just thought, that's it, that's the woman. She has a face that you put a camera on and the camera doesn't want to leave. And she could do English, which I hadn't even known. So I said, you have the part." — Mel Gibson, Cinephilia & Beyond (date n.d.)
The role was Marceau's first English-speaking part. She has said in subsequent interviews that the dialect coaching was less of a problem than the stillness Gibson asked of her — Isabelle's character in the film is a watcher, particularly in the throne-room scenes where Longshanks and the Prince debate without addressing her directly.
What the performance does
Marceau plays Isabelle through her face. The truce-banner scene at the barn (beat 29) is built around two pieces of staging — Isabelle and Wallace seated across from each other while Wallace tells her about the trap-summit barn, then Wallace naming Murron for the first time on screen.b29 Marceau holds the watching position; the camera reads her decision to throw her loyalty across the lines as it happens.
"Marceau does the most difficult thing an actor can do: she changes her mind on camera, and the audience watches it happen. The decision is in her eyes before it is in her dialogue." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1995)
The bedside-of-Longshanks scene late in the film — "Your blood dies with you. A child who is not of your line grows in my belly"b38 — is the structural mirror to the parley scene: where Isabelle had to not speak in the throne room, here she speaks while Longshanks cannot. Marceau plays the speech without raising her voice, which is the choice the film needs.
After Braveheart
Marceau went directly into Anna Karenina (1997) and the Bond film The World Is Not Enough (1999), in which she played the villain Elektra King. The 1999 picture was her highest-grossing English-language credit. She has continued to work primarily in French cinema, directing Speak to Me of Love (2002) and Trivial (2007). She returned to international attention in 2014 with the François Ozon picture and has continued steadily through the 2020s.
"Marceau is now at the age where the camera reads her differently — and she is choosing scripts that use the difference. She is one of the few French actresses of her generation who has gotten more interesting, not less." — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (2015, archived)