Emmanuelle riva biography

There was always something a touch withdrawn and reserved about the French actress Emmanuelle Riva. She was clearly a serious person, and she always kept her personal life and decisions as private as possible. In her late 80s, when she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in for her performance as the fallen partner of Jean-Louis Trintignant in Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” Riva was something of an unknown quantity to American audiences, even if some art house patrons remembered her first impact in Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima mon amour” ().

Riva never married or had children, and she only entered into her profession at the age of 26 after a life in a rural area of France, where she trained to be a seamstress; her father was a sign painter, and her family opposed her decision to go into acting.

Riva had begun to get work in the theater when she was cast in “Hiroshima mon amour,” where her voice was often heard on the soundtrack softly intoning lines of narration and anguis