Isabelle Adjani, the mysteries of a vocation

Isabelle Adjani prefers to avoid looking at her grandfather's birth certificate, which we bring her. She prefers it to be read to her. Mohammed Bensalah Hadjami was born on May 22, 1898, in Philippeville, now Skikda, Algeria. The actress has always heard him referred to by another first name, Saïd, without ever having seen a single photo of him. She is startled and shocked to learn that the word "native" appears in parentheses under his name. French citizenship status was then denied to Muslim populations. He is Kabyle, therefore Berber.

The name "Hadjami" is typically Algerian. It was missing two letters when, a quarter of a century later, Mohammed Chérif Adjani, the actress's father, was born in 1923 in Constantine. "You get off lightly when you're born in the 1920s in French Algeria and you only lose one or two letters from your name ," comments historian Benjamin Stora, a specialist in the region's history. "He could have lost his entire name."

Two letters less is an act of contempt and neglect for a father. For his daughter, "this name becomes a kind of pseudonym," she says. A name that sounds different today. A star name, a name inhabited, embodied, written in capital letters, for several decades, on posters, in cinema and in the theater. As if the peremptory initiative of a civil servant in Algeria, instead of disfiguring it, had revealed it.

Isabelle Yasmina Adjani, born in 1955 in Paris, has made 45 films, a dozen TV films, 15 plays, many stage readings (a genre she loves), and songs too. All this in fifty-five years. With her first film appearance at the age of 15, she became an adored resident of the Comédie-Française at 17, where she immediately shone in three Molière plays. Then actress in The Slap (1974), by Claude Pinoteau, The Story of Adele H. (1975), by François Truffaut, The Tenant (1976), by Roman Polanski, Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night (1979), by Werner Herzog, Possession (1981), by Andrzej Zulawski, Deadly Hike (1983), by Claude Miller, The Murderous Summer (1983), by Jean Becker, Camille Claudel (1988), by Bruno Nuytten, Queen Margot (1994), by Patrice Chéreau…

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