Say bienvenue to the latest heartthrob from France……actor Jean Dujardin does not utter a single word of dialogue in the contemporary silent film THE ARTIST, but he is already inspiring fan clubs around the world, as well as serious buzz about Golden Globe and Oscar nominations later this year. Following his win as Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, this has been a whirlwind six months for the French thespian, whose film opened theatrically in North America this past week via The Weinstein Company. If Harvey Weinstein has anything to say about it, Dujardin will become only the second actor in Oscar history to win the Best Actor trophy in a foreign language film (following Italian actor Robert Benigni’s surprise win for LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL in 1997.)
Born in a Parisian suburb in 1972, Dujardin is the youngest of four brothers who grew up in a middle-class bourgeois family. .He studied drawing and worked as a locksmith to make ends meet, but decided to take up acting at the age of 24, performing at bars and cabarets with a French style of stand-up comedy mixed with character-driven comic spoofs. In 1998, his performance as one of the members of a parody boy-band called Nous C Nous (Us Is Us) made his reputation in his native France as a kind of Saturday Night Live comic caricature. An ever bigger French television sensation was his regular appearance in a six minute tv spot titled UN GARS, UNE FILLE, where he starred with is real life wife Alexandra Lamy as a couple who deal with the humdrum aspects of married life. In this series, the comic actor refined his cheeky sense of humor and his expressive rubber face became familiar to millions of viewers.
The director of the OSS 117 spy spoofs was Michel Hazanavicius, who had an audacious idea to shoot a contemporary silent film about the heyday of 1920s Hollywood. He turned to his friend Dujardin, who at first rejected the idea as ridiculous and possibly career suicide. However, the strong script that chronicles the fall from grace of a Hollywood silent film star who cannot adjust to the new era of talkies, eventually seduced the actor. The film, shot in Los Angeles in black and white, has echoes of the musical SINGING IN THE RAIN (also set in the period when talkies devastated silent films) and A STAR IS BORN, the chronicle of the differing careers of two actors in Hollywood…..the veteran whose career is self-destructing and the ingénue who career is on the rise.