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Danièle Lebrun is a highly regarded leading actress of the French stage. Her career began when her older brother, philosopher Gérard Lebrun (1930-1999), introduced her to director Claude Autant-Lara. Although Lara considered her too young for his film The Immature Grain (1954), he encouraged her acting aspirations. Lebrun made her theatrical debut in Arthur Miller's The Crucible at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, directed by Raymond Rouleau. She then studied drama at the Conservatoire, won first prize for acting, and joined the Comédie-Française for two years. Over six decades, she has performed in numerous classic plays by Molière, Pirandello, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and others, earning a Critics Union Award in 1976 for Madame de Sade and two Molière Awards (1992 and 2006) for her roles in Le Misanthrope and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, respectively. She returned to the Comédie-Française in 2011.
Although she appeared infrequently on screen during the 1960s, Lebrun landed her first leading role at the decade's end as Grushenka in a French TV adaptation of Les frères Karamazov (1969). From the 1970s onward, she became a favorite in literary adaptations and period dramas, particularly on television. Notable roles include Baroness Roxane de Saint-Gély in Marcel Bluwal's series Les nouvelles aventures de Vidocq (1971) and the title role in Bérénice (1975), queen of Judaea, from Jean Racine's tragedy. She also portrayed Empress Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte's first wife, in the biopic Joséphine ou la comédie des ambitions (1979), and Napoleon's mother Maria-Letizia Bonaparte ("Madame Mère") in the comedy Madame Sans-Gêne (2002). More recently, Lebrun played Yvonne de Gaulle, wife of Charles de Gaulle, in a two-part miniseries; Madame Cuchet, a murder victim in the French Bluebeard Landru (2005); and Emilienne, one of four pensioners who plan a retirement home robbery to relive their youth, in Les vieux calibres (2013), directed by her husband Marcel Bluwal.
Danièle Lebrun's first marriage was to journalist François de Closets. Her second husband was filmmaker Marcel Bluwal, who frequently directed her on screen. He passed away in 2021.
