Marion Cotillard

Cotillard was born on 30 September 1975 in Paris, and grew up in Alfortville, in the southern suburbs of Paris, where she lived with her family in a flat on the 18th floor of a tower block until she was 11 years old, when her family moved to the small commune of Aulnay-la-Rivière in the Loiret department in north-central France. She grew up in an artistically inclined household. Her mother, Niseema Theillaud, is an actress and drama teacher. Her father, Jean-Claude Cotillard, is an actor, teacher, former mime, and theatre director, of Breton descent. She has two younger twin brothers, Quentin and Guillaume, a writer and a sculptor. The family later moved to La Beauce, a town near Orléans, where her father set up his own theatre company.

Cotillard's father introduced her to cinema, and as a child she would mimic Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo in her own bedroom. She began acting during her childhood, appearing in one of her father's plays. At the age of 3, she appeared on stage for the first time opposite her mother.

At the age of 15, Cotillard entered the Conservatoire d'art dramatique in Orléans. She graduated in 1994 and then moved to Paris to pursue an acting career.

In order to pay her bills in her teens, she started making key-chains in her own factory at home and sold them at candy stores.

Cotillard speaks French and English fluently. She learned English at the age of 11. She started learning Spanish at school but then abandoned it. Years later, she began studying the language again after watching Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998) by Julio Medem, which is one of her favorite films. She also started learning Danish because she wanted to work with director Thomas Vinterberg after watching his 1998 film The Celebration, but that did not work out.