Lifelike lockdown: Emmanuelle Seigner on the challenges of playing a real-life wife in Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Appeared in Hour, 2007When actress and model Emmanuelle Seigner posed for the cover of the April 1988 issue of Elle France, she had no idea that the robust man behind the magazine, editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, was six years away from suffering a massive stroke that would leave his body almost entirely paralyzed – a rare condition known as “locked-in syndrome.”
She had posed for Elle several times that year to promote the release of her film Frantic (directed by her husband Roman Polanski), and remembers Bauby as an intelligent and vibrant man who loved beautiful women and whom beautiful women loved back. “He was a bit arrogant and a playboy, you know?” she recalls. “But somebody very bright and with a lot of culture. A very interesting guy.”
Nearly 20 years later, Seigner finds herself posing as Bauby’s ex-wife Céline Desmoulins in director Julian Schnabel’s screen adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Bauby’s remarkable post-stroke memoir, which was dictated letter by letter to a transcriber by blinking his left eye – his only piece of bodily equipment still functioning after the stroke. In the book, Bauby richly describes the two worlds in which he lived – the painful day-to-day routines of an invalid, contrasted with the vivid mind-games he played to keep his perfectly functioning brain engaged. He died just days after its publication.
At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the stunning blond 40-something actress discussed the challenges of playing Céline. “The role was
complicated because she’s a woman that was left six months before the accident, with three kids,” she explains. “And she’s still in love with him. I didn’t want her to be bitter… and I didn’t want her to be a saint either. So it was very hard with Julian to find the right mood and the right thing to make her noble and nice, with dignity but still with feelings and a personality.”
It also was the first time in Seigner’s career that she was faced with the responsibility of playing a non-fictional character, not to mention someone she knew in real life (her character in last year’s La Vie en rose, a biopic about the life of Edith Piaf, was fictional). “I had met [Céline] at parties and stuff,” says Seigner, “I [told Julian] I didn’t want to meet her again. I didn’t want to copy or imitate her – I wanted to do it my own way.”
Her strategy worked. “I was very touched,” remembers Seigner. “When the movie came out in Cannes, the woman I played called me sobbing on the phone and said, ‘Thank you from me and the kids.’ For me it was like the best compliment because it means I didn’t betray the family – when you do that type of thing you don’t want to betray anyone.”
But apparently you can’t please everybody all of the time. The woman Bauby left his family for apparently wasn’t too pleased by Seigner’s sympathetic portrayal of her lover’s ex-wife. “I know she hates me in a way,” says Seigner, “but I just did my job, you know. It’s very complicated when you do that type of thing.”