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Josiane Balasko

Wrote for, and performed with, the Parisian theater group "Splendid" before initiating her popular screen career in Patrice Leconte's "Les Petits Calins" (1978). Balasko directed her first features, "All Mixed Up," in 1985 and is best known to international audiences as the emotionally satisfying, but physically unattractive, mistress of Gerard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier's "Too Beautiful For You" (1989). Balasko tends to play comic roles which punctures male machismo, and which have wreaked havoc on the popular images of French sexuality. Declining to describe herself as a feminist -- or be labeled as anything else in particular, except an artist -- Balasko's scripts and directorial turns have been breaking ground in France, where her "French Twist," the 1995 story of a butch lesbian (played by Balasko), who becomes involved with a bourgeois couple whose marriage is shaky and whose self-images are shaky as well, was the second-highest grossing domestic film of the year.