Chiara Mastroianni

Chiara Mastroianni is the daughter of movie stars Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. She was born in Paris in 1972. From a very young age, she attended film sets and artistic entourages of both parents, who separated in 1975. She made her debut at only seven years old with her mother in Us Two by Claude Lelouch. As a child and as a teenager, she acted in other films such as Dark Eyes with her father Marcello in 1987. After finishing high school in France, Mastroianni began studying Italian at the Sorbonne to become a translator. However, following her friend Melvil Poupaud’s suggestion, she decided to focus on her acting career, focusing on arthouse cinema and comedy and working both with her mother and father in France and Italy.

In 1994, she was nominated at the César Awards thanks to her performance in André Techiné’s My favorite season. In the same year she participated in other films such as Ready to Wear by Robert Altman and Don’t forget You’re Going to Die. In 1996, the year her father died, she acted with him in Raúl Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death. At the end of the Nineties, she acted in films such as Ecstasy Generation (1997), One Hundred and One Nights (1995), Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999), which was inspired by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Manoel Oliveira’s The Letter (1999) and Sergio Castellitto’s Libero Burro (1999). In 1998, she was a Jury member at the Cannes Film Festival. In the new millennium, she has kept working with the biggest names of Italian and French cinema: The Words of My Father (2001) by Francesca Comencini, It’s Easier for a Camel… (2003) by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, A Christmas Tale (2007), Akoibon (2007), The Beautiful Person (2008), Making plans for Lena (2009), The Zero Hour (2010), The Beloved (2011), Chicken with Plums (2011), Americano (2011), Augustine (2012), Bastards (2013), On a Magical Night (2019). She has also worked as director and voice actress: in 2006 she directed the documentary Ritratto di uno sconosciuto and dubbed the main character in Marjane Satrapi’s animated film Persepolis (2008).