Bonnaire was born in the town of Gannat, Allier, in the Auvergne region. She was born into a working-class family, the seventh of eleven children. Her acting career began in 1983, when she starred in the Maurice Pialat film À Nos Amours at age 16. She played a girl from Paris beginning her sexual awakening. In 1984 she received the César Award for Most Promising Actress. Her international breakthrough came in 1985 when she played the main character in Vagabond, directed by Agnès Varda, for which she won her second César Award. She portrays a vagrant who fails both physically and morally. The film premiered at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion. The jury deemed Bonnaire's performance among the best ofthe year, but decided against awarding her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress prize because both the actresses they judged to have given the best performances were in films that won major awards. Bonnaire worked again with Pialat on Under the Sun of Satan which won the Palme d'Or at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Monsieur Hire, directed by Patrice Leconte, followed in 1989, along with further work with directors Jacques Doillon and Claude Sautet. In 1995 Bonnaire starred as an apparently simple maid in Claude Chabrol's widely acclaimed thriller La Cérémonie. The film and its stars won awards internationally, including Best Actress at the 52nd Venice Film Festival for both Bonnaire and co-star Isabelle Huppert. In 2004 Bonnaire starred in another Leconte film, Intimate Strangers, which was an arthouse box-office hit in the United States. In 2017 Bonnaire starred in Gaël Morel's film about reverse immigration, Prendre le large. At the 8th Magritte Awards she received an Honorary Magritte Award from the Académie André Delvaux.
Personal life
Bonnaire has a daughter, Jeanne, from a relationship with actor William Hurt, whom she met in 1991 during filming of the Albert Camus novel The Plague. They acted together in Secrets Shared with a Stranger. In 2003, she married actor and screenwriter Guillaume Laurant, with whom she has a second daughter, Adèle. They divorced in 2015.
