Biography
Agnes Jaoui, frequently likened to “the Woody Allen” of France, first earned notice through performances in Un Air de Famille and Le Rôle de Sa Vie while simultaneously building a career as screenwriter and director. Her inaugural feature behind the camera, The Taste of Others (Le Goût des Autres), received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 2000. Raised in Paris with ambitions to act, she trained at a leading conservatory, where she encountered Jean-Pierre Bacri in 1987; the two later collaborated on numerous projects. The daughter of Jewish emigrants from Tunisia, Jaoui also cultivated an early passion for music, taking voice lessons as a teenager and contributing songs to several of her own films. Although devoted to baroque repertoire, she developed a strong interest in Latin music and, in 2005, appeared at various French venues with fellow musicians from Cuba, Bolivia, and Argentina. Those concerts prompted the 2006 release of her debut album Canta, a set of pieces sung in Spanish and Portuguese. While juggling film work, she found time in 2009 to record and issue a second album, Dans Mon Pays. In 2014 she joined soprano Natalie Dessay, actress/singer Helena Noguerra, and guitarist Liat Cohen for the collaborative project Rio Paris.
Albums
