Stellar dramatic performances, such as the very first scene French actress Marion Cotillard shot for this year’s Golden Globe-nominated movie Rust and Bone—showing her regaining consciousness after an accident and leaping from a hospital bed, only to end up on the floor, sobbing, after discovering that both her legs are gone—have earned her the Hasty Pudding Theatricals award as “Woman of the Year.”
“My feeling was that, in that situation, which is so violent and horrifying, the shock must be so strong that you're in denial,” the actress, a Golden Globe nominee for best actress, recently told The Los Angeles Times. “And you have to know—even if you don't want to—whether it's really true, so you would try to walk. And that's when you find out.”
Best known for her recent supporting role in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and her Academy Award-winning performance as singer Edith Piaf in the 2007 film La Vie en Rose, Cotillard stars in Rust and Bone as Stephanie, a killer-whale trainer and performer at a marine park who becomes the victim of a horrific attack in which a whale bites off her legs just above the knee.
Cotillard joins an elite list of actresses honored by the nation’s oldest undergraduate drama troupe, among them Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Katharine Hepburn, Jodie Foster, Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Hathaway, and, most recently, “Homeland” star Claire Danes.
The Woman of the Year festivities will begin at 2:45 p.m. on January 31, when Cotillard will lead a parade into Harvard Square. Following the parade, the president of Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Renée Rober ’13, and the vice president of the cast, Ben Moss ’13, will host a celebratory roast for the actress. At 4 p.m., Cotillard will be presented with her replica Pudding Pot at Farkas Hall, with a press conference following. Hasty Pudding cast members will then perform several musical numbers from the group’s 165th production, There’s Something About Maui.
