Clotilde Hesme

Early in The Returned (2012), a young man knocks on a door in a French mountain town, and the woman who opens it has spent years building a life in which he does not exist. Clotilde Hesme plays Adèle, and what she does in that doorway is what she does everywhere: she lets the body answer before the face does. The shoulders go first, then the hands, and the words, when they come, are the least of it. Fabrice Gobert's series has almost no scares and a great deal of dread, and a good share of the dread lives in Hesme. We found her harder to watch than any of the programme's dead; a woman holding together a recovery we could see fraying was more frightening, and sadder, than anything walking back into town.

She came up through the theatre, with François Orsoni's company from 1999, and it shows. She is an actor of presence rather than close-up, most at ease when the frame has to hold all of her. The cinema took notice through Philippe Garrel, who gave her Lilie in Regular Lovers (2005) opposite Louis Garrel, and Christophe Honoré, whose musical Love Songs (2007) put her in front of a wider audience in a year she made four films. Then Alix Delaporte's Angèle et Tony (2010) gave her a lead, an atypical love story she has described plainly: "You have to play her with your whole body." That sentence is as good a summary of her method as any critic has managed.

The complaint against her first decade is fair, and it is not hers to answer. The parts were secondary, the leads were men, and the films were built around them; she was the woman the young man came home to. It took Delaporte, three films together now, to keep putting her at the centre, and Diane a les épaules (2017) to hand her a woman who wants things and says so. Since The Returned she has divided herself between films of that kind and recurring television, Juliette Pellegrini in Lupin (2021–2023) among them, with a Hamlet on stage in 2024. It is a sensible way to work and a slightly frustrating one to follow, because the parts that reach the most people are not the ones that use her best.

She has said she needs the theatre for her equilibrium, because there nobody minds much about image. Watching her on screen, that rings true: she has never seemed to be checking how she looks, which is rarer than it should be. Start with the first eight episodes of The Returned, which are as fine as this kind of television gets, and watch what she does with a door.