What surprised me most about her was the consecutive happiness - huge happiness - and then tragedy, Cotillard said. Her life was like this wave of amazing things and then deep, deep drama. Towards the end, the doctors told the people around her they couldn't explain how she was still alive.
I think it was passion and love that kept her going. She was full of those things. When I started on the project I didn't know anything about her except a few songs and the (Piaf trademark) little black dress.
But then I discovered the tyrannical behaviour and I didn't want to look at it because it was a dark side that I didn't accept. Then one day I read the script again and there is a line where she is asked whether she is afraid of death and she says she is more afraid of being alone - and I understood. I don't excuse her behaviour because I don't have the right to excuse or not.
My aim was to understand her. The glamorous Cotillard came to understand the self-destructive Piaf so well, critic Stephen Holden recently called her performance the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another I've ever encountered on film . Olivier Dahan's film about the Little Sparrow is a breakthrough for Cotillard, until now best known outside France as the woman to whom Russell Crowe's character lost his heart in Ridley Scott's What surprised me most about her was the consecutive happiness - huge happiness - and then tragedy, Cotillard said.
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