Ludivine Sagnier
Ludivine Sagnier is a French actress, known to international audiences for the films Swimming Pool and Peter Pan, and the Netflix series Lupin. She has also appeared in the English-language series The Young Pope and The Serpent Queen.
Sagnier has been nominated for the César Award for Best Supporting Actress three times, for her performances in 8 Women, Swimming Pool, and A Secret.
Early life
Sagnier was born on 3 July 1979 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, in the département of Yvelines, France, and grew up in Sèvres. Her mother is a retired secretary and her father is a professor of English at the University of Paris. She has one sister, Delphine. As a child, Sagnier underwent abdominal surgery to remove a benign tumor from her intestine, resulting in a surgical scar on her abdomen. Following this surgery, she also fell ill with meningitis, from which she recovered.Sagnier studied piano at a young age but disliked performing music, and instead opted to take acting classes with her parents' permission. Commenting on this, she said: "My only desire was to escape classical music. In my family, everyone is a musician. I took piano lessons and I hated this instrument. To escape it and music theory, I asked to take acting classes. It was during one of them that I was noticed for a casting. And I was accepted. It then took me years to understand that this was the profession I wanted to pursue."
Career
1989–2003
She made her film debut at the age of nine in Les Maris, les Femmes, les Amants, directed by Pascal Thomas, and had other minor roles in the early 1990s, including an appearance in Cyrano de Bergerac with Gerard Depardieu.Sagnier's career began in earnest in adulthood, as she gained commercial and critical success for her performances in three films directed by François Ozon: Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 8 Women, and Swimming Pool. 8 Women was awarded acting prizes for Sagnier and her seven co-stars collectively.
In Swimming Pool, a psychological thriller, she starred alongside Charlotte Rampling. Sagnier received significant international media attention for performing several nude scenes in the film, having previously also done so in Water Drops on Burning Rocks; she would later express disappointment that this led directors in the United States to attempt to typecast her in sexually explicit roles. Nonetheless her work in Swimming Pool earned her several accolades, including a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the César Awards. Also in 2003, Sagnier played Tinker Bell in P.J. Hogan's live-action adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Initially, she had been brought in to provide inspiration to the film's visual effects department for a CGI model that was being created for the character, but she impressed the production team with her performance and was cast in the role.
2004–2020
Despite being primed for a lucrative international career in the wake of Swimming Pool and Peter Pan, Sagnier chose to focus primarily on French cinema, stating that she felt uncomfortable with the competitive nature of the Hollywood film industry. She subsequently appeared in French films including Love Songs, A Secret, which garnered her another César nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and Mesrine. 2011 saw her return to international work with a role in the biographical drama The Devil's Double. In 2016, she appeared alongside Jude Law in the Paolo Sorrentino-directed miniseries The Young Pope, later reprising her role in the follow-up series The New Pope.2021–present
Since 2021 Sagnier has starred in the Netflix-produced crime thriller series Lupin as Claire Laurent, the estranged wife of protagonist Assane Diop and the mother to their son Raoul, whom she is raising alone. Loosely based on the Arsène Lupin stories written by Maurice Leblanc, the show became an international hit, and has been regarded as one of Netflix' most successful series in a language other than English. Sagnier's performance as Claire has received praise from critics, with Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times writing that "like Sy, brings a lot of soul to her part... and the two actors have great chemistry."Following the success of Lupin, Sagnier was cast in several English-language historical dramas. In the STARZ series The Serpent Queen, about the life and rise to power of Catherine de' Medici, she portrayed Catherine's rival Diane de Poitiers. Sagnier said that she was drawn to the role of Diane because she was interested in playing an antagonist, something she had seldom done in her career prior to then. She also made an appearance as Thérésa Tallien in Ridley Scott's biopic Napoleon, though her performance was cut from the theatrical version of the film, and played composer Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy in the Apple TV+ miniseries Franklin, about Benjamin Franklin's expedition to France during the time of the American Revolutionary War.
In 2024, Sagnier featured in the film adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu's novel And Their Children After Them, and reunited with François Ozon after a two-decade hiatus in their creative relationship for When Fall Is Coming. That same year she was nominated for a Molière Award for her performance in Le Consentement, a one-woman play based on the memoir of the same name by Vanessa Springora.
Personal life
Sagnier gave birth to a daughter in 2005, with her then boyfriend, actor Nicolas Duvauchelle. She is in a relationship with her partner, director Kim Chapiron, with whom she has two daughters.In a 2019 podcast interview with journalist Frédéric Taddeï, Sagnier stated that the politician she admired most was left-wing former Minister of Justice of France Christiane Taubira. In 2024, she was one of 230 artists who signed a petition calling on president Emmanuel Macron to officially recognize the state of Palestine.
Since 2020, Sagnier has developed and taught an acting course at the École Kourtrajmé. The school, founded in 2018 by director Ladj Ly in his native Montfermeil, provides training to students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds who are interested in pursuing careers in the dramatic arts and the film industry.