Catherine Frot (/ˈkæθrɪn ˈfroʊ/; born 1 May 1956) is a French actress. A nine-time César Award nominee, she won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1996 film Family Resemblances. Her other films include Le Dîner de Cons (1998), La Dilettante (1999), Haute Cuisine (2012) and Marguerite (2015).

Biography

Early life
The daughter of an engineer and a mathematics teacher, Frot demonstrated comic traits and expressions at an early age. At the age of fourteen, she enrolled in the Versailles conservatory while still in school. By 1974, she began her education at the Rue Blanche school and afterwards took up full-time studies at the conservatory.


Career
In 1975, she demonstrated her talent at the Festival d'Avignon in the Compagnie du Chapeau Rouge which she founded with the help of others. From then on, Catherine put all her energy into theatre performances in roles such as the Présidente de Tourvel in the play Les Liaisons dangereuses in 1987. She performed in a number of classical plays such as La Cerisaie, directed by Peter Brook in 1982, and La Mouette directed by Pierre Pradinas in 1985. She also received the Theatrical Critic Award in 1983 for her role in Jean Bouchot's C'était comment déjà ?.

In films, Frot has made an enormous reputation in France. She won the César Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1996, for playing Yolande, 'the sweet silly wife of a provincial bully' in Cédric Klapisch's Un air de famille and was funny and moving as a wealthy, rebellious nuisance in La Dilettante (1999). In 7 ans de mariage, a kind of French remake of The Seven Year Itch, Frot played a prudish banker, wife and mother, who is drawn by her bored, sexually frustrated husband into the world of Parisian clubs échangistes, or wife-swapping clubs.

Best films