Curated playlist
César Honorary Award recipients
- Jude LawJude Law was born David Jude Heyworth Law on the 29th of December 1972, in the London borough of Lewisham, and his first name came from a person none of his fans would recognise: the best friend of his father. The name everyone knows,…
- Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the movies instead. That is where his passion for cinema began, in a child who could…
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his…
- Quentin TarantinoQuentin Tarantino was born on the 27th of March 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a mother who let him watch R-rated films as a child and a father he never met. By his late twenties, he would be handing a barely formatted screenplay to a…
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest of the outreach. This is a filmmaker whose movies have earned over $6 billion…
- Meryl StreepMeryl Streep walked into a casting meeting with Dino De Laurentiis in 1976, hoping to audition for his King Kong remake. De Laurentiis looked at her and said, in Italian, to his son: "This is so ugly. Why did you bring me this?" What he…
- Kirk DouglasKirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on the 9th of December 1916, the only son among seven children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Amsterdam, New York. His father had been a horse trader in Russia and became a ragman in…
- Harrison FordHarrison Ford was born on the 13th of July, 1942, at the Swedish Covenant Hospital in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago. He spent years as a self-taught carpenter, building shelves and cabinets for Hollywood writers, before anyone…
- Bette DavisBette Davis died on the 6th of October, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, too weak to make the journey home after her cancer returned during a visit to Spain. Her tombstone reads: "She did it the hard way." That…
- Clint EastwoodClinton Eastwood Jr. entered the world at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco on the 31st of May, 1930, weighing 11 pounds 6 ounces. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him "Samson." Nobody in that delivery room could have…
- Michael DouglasMichael Kirk Douglas was born on the 25th of September, 1944, into a household already saturated with Hollywood ambition. His father, Kirk Douglas, had risen from poverty to become one of the defining stars of American cinema. His mother,…
- Will SmithWill Smith was born on the 25th of September 1968 in Philadelphia, and before he turned thirty, he had already won Grammy Awards as a rapper, anchored a hit television sitcom, and starred in one of the highest-grossing films in Hollywood…
- Scarlett JohanssonScarlett Johansson was born on the 22nd of November 1984 in the Manhattan borough of New York City, and by the time she was nine years old she had already appeared on national television. What followed was a career that would make her the…
- Walt DisneyWalt Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards won by an individual, with 22 wins from 59 nominations. Yet the man behind that record was, in private, shy, self-deprecating, and insecure. He once told a friend, "I'm not Walt Disney.…
- Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard once said: "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order." That line, delivered with the offhand certainty of someone who had spent decades dismantling the very idea of…
- Diana RossDiana Ross was born on the 26th of March 1944, and her very name was an accident. Her mother intended to call her Diane, but whoever filled out the birth certificate made a mistake, and the name Diana stuck on paper. Her family and every…