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Just as Audrey Hepburn will forever be Holly Golightly, so fellow gamine Audrey Tautou will always be associated with the role of Amélie Poulain. Yet things might have been very different if Emily Watson had accepted Jean-Pierre Jeunet's invitation.

Born and raised in the Auvergne, Tautou came to Paris as a 17 year-old and made her big screen debut in Tonie Mar... [+]

Just as Audrey Hepburn will forever be Holly Golightly, so fellow gamine Audrey Tautou will always be associated with the role of Amélie Poulain. Yet things might have been very different if Emily Watson had accepted Jean-Pierre Jeunet's invitation.

Born and raised in the Auvergne, Tautou came to Paris as a 17 year-old and made her big screen debut in Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty (1998) after winning a Canal+ talent contest. Her performance as a naive beautician earned her the César for Most Promising Female Newcomer. But it was Amélie (2001) that made Tautou an international star, as it became the all-time highest grossing French film and captured the hearts of those who didn't see its story of a mischievous Montmartre waitress with a talent for improving other people's lives as a pro-conservative tract.

Such was the picture's success that Tautou was inevitably hired for such frothy, entertaining fare as Pascale Bailly's God Is Great, I'm Not (2001) and Cédric Klapisch's ensemble romp Pot Luck (2002) and its sequel Russian Dolls (2005). However, she refused to be typecast and essayed an artist dangerously besotted with a married doctor in Laetitia Colombani's thriller He Loves Me.. He Loves Me Not (2002) and a Turkish maid stumbling on to a shocking secret in a London hotel in Stephen Frears's realist drama Dirty Pretty Things (2003).

But it took a reunion with Jeunet on the Great War saga A Very Long Engagement (2004), in which Tautou excelled as a polio victim searching for her missing soldier fiancé, to convince critics that she had the range to become a great actress. Her second César nomination also persuaded Ron Howard to cast her as cryptographer Sophie Neveu in his take on Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code (2006).

Tautou has since continued to sparkle in romcoms like Pierre Salvadori's Priceless (2006) and Beautiful Lies (2010), as well as David Foenkinos's Delicacy (2011). But don't let the elfin charm or precise comic timing fool you. She can also do darkly self-possessed, as she proved as the eponymous fashion icon in Anne Fontaine's 2009 biopic, Coco Before Chanel. [-]