Each day, as she began the long process of being transformed into Edith Piaf at the skilled hands of a make-up artist, Marion Cotillard would sit patiently listening to music – not Piaf anthems like Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, but Radiohead – and contemplate the gruelling day's filming ahead. There was plenty to ponder. Piaf’s life was an epic journey from extreme poverty to worldwide acclaim, with love, tragedy, addiction, fame and despair crammed into 47 intense years. Playing Piaf was the challenge of a career – but at times it seemed as if Cotillard wouldn’t get the chance to attempt it.

For the challenge wasn’t merely to play, say, an emotionally charged scene in which a drunken Piaf is told that her young daughter is dying. No, as she sat for two hours in the make-up chair, Cotillard, along with some of the crew, worried whether anyone would actually believe she was anything like the singer at all.

Playing an icon is one thing; playing her as an old lady is another. “And by the end, her body was so frail she was like an old lady – and along with the director, the make-up artist and the cameraman, I didn’t know if it would work. Inside, I don’t know what it is to be 47 and to look 80, or to act like a child and to be about to die.” And when you meet Cotillard it is indeed hard to imagine why director Olivier Dahan picked her to play Piaf. The singer nicknamed La Môme Piaf – the Sparrow Kid – was tiny: just 4ft 8in; a tough former street urchin, a survivor with an unforgettable voice who was never regarded as a great beauty. Cotillard, 31, is a foot taller, elegant and pretty; more of a swan than a sparrow.

“When I was writing the script I thought of her and I never seriously considered anyone else,” explains Dahan. “I’d never met her, but I’d seen some of her films and I just knew that she would be right. She is a fantastic actress, but yes, of course she doesn’t look like Piaf at all – she is too beautiful, too tall.”

BACKGROUND

• La Vie En Rose

• La Vie En Rose - Sunday Times review

BACKGROUND

• Poor chick: the life of Piaf

• Edith Piaf

• Playing Piaf is risky for a rising star

Piaf, the woman behind the icon

French chanteuse Edith Piaf packed a lot of drama into her short life – a new biopic reveals the woman behind the icon

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His faith paid off spectacularly. The film was given a rapturous reception at its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and Cotillard was understandably praised for a performance that could easily win her an Oscar nomination, it’s that good. But at one point, after a succession of make-up artists failed to get the Piaf look, both actress and director feared that it wasn’t going to happen.

“Doing all the make-up tests was very difficult, and it was very worrying – because I knew that we had to get that part right,” says Cotillard. “It was crucial. My performance as Piaf depended on the audience believing in me as her. If they didn’t accept me as her, then it didn’t matter what my performance was like. We tried a lot of different make-up people – I can’t remember how many – until, thankfully, we found Didier Lavergne who did the most amazing job.”

Lavergne shaved the front of Cotillard’s head to give her Piaf’s distinctive high forehead, and hid the rest of her hair under a series of tightly curled wigs. He built up her lips and completely changed the shape of her mouth and cheeks. The result is very effective. But another major challenge was the music. Dahan intended to use the original songs, and for Cotillard – a talented singer – to mime.

“I knew from the beginning I would need the real voice of Piaf,” he says. “It was fundamental. It took us a year of negotiations to get the rights to the songs, and that was going on all through the preparation and the shooting; we were arguing with the owner.”

For each take involving Piaf singing, a sound system would blast her voice out on to the set, but instead of just miming, Cotillard would sing along. “I wanted that energy, I wanted to feel it, and it’s not the same when you mime. And I tried to sing like her. Not because we were going to use my voice, but because it helped to become her. It’s not just about the voice, it’s about the physical posture and the silences between the notes. And the length of the silences was the hardest thing to get right for me.”

Cotillard gets it all spot-on, however, convincingly appearing to belt out Piaf’s music throughout, from street performer to international cabaret star. Tellingly, Dahan, now 39, first cut his creative teeth directing French TV shows and music videos for the likes of the Cranberries, before a chance discovery of a biography of Piaf gave him the idea of making a biopic of her troubled life.

“I wasn’t a fan and I didn’t know much about her or her music,” he recalls. “I was hanging around the area where I live in Paris, went into a Virgin Megastore and picked up a book, by chance, and looked at the photos. There was one from the Thirties when she was very young, and it was so far from the iconic image that came later. It’s a photo of her in a street and she looks like a punk – in a way she looks quite modern; the clothes, the attitude. She was about 18 and wasn’t yet Edith Piaf the star, just this girl on the street. But you could see that she had something about her, even then; something tough and vulnerable at the same time. I sent a text to my producer right then saying, ‘I want to make a movie about Edith Piaf,’ and ten minutes later one came back saying, ‘Let’s do it.’ Then I started to find out more about this extraordinary life.”

Piaf’s life certainly makes for extraordinary drama: born in Paris in 1915, she was abandoned by her mother as a toddler and left by her father, a circus acrobat, in the care of his mother, who ran a brothel in Normandy. At three years old she suffered from an extreme form of conjunctivitis that left her blind. She regained her sight years later, when some of the prostitutes pooled their cash to pay for treatment, an episode featured in the film. Another story has her temporarily deaf at the age of 14, which Dahan doesn’t include. Indeed, many of what some might consider crucial events in her life – her teenage pregnancy, her two marriages, her work with the French Resistance during the Second World War – are barely touched upon.

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