Marion Cotillard is the latest top performer reported to be considering a part in "The Dark Knight Rises." Even Christopher Nolan skeptics like myself have got to admit the man has superb taste in actors.
Cotillard nearly gave Nolan's "Inception" a beating heart. If you've seen the under-praised 2004 French masterpiece "A Very Long Engagement," you know Cotillard can be a strapping, stylish femme fatale. As the romantic hat-check girl in "Public Enemies" (2009), she had a very different kind of vibrancy and emotionalism. She made you know exactly what she was feeling, even when her character couldn't figure out whether to trust a self-styled Robin Hood like Johnny Depp's John Dillinger.
Cotillard's Oscar-winning characterization of Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" (2007) was the kind of galvanizing, spend-it-all biopic performance that too often caps a career instead of kicking it into high gear. Happily, Cotillard is one Oscar-winner who leaps from strength to strength. Even in a wildly erratic, hyper-theatrical movie like "Nine" (2009), she acted with passionate limpidity.
No matter what Nolan throws at her, trust Cotillard to go all the way with it.
