Marie-Josée Croze

Though she would garner international attention after winning a Best Actress Genie award for her deeply conflicted performance in Denis Villeneuve's 2000 drama Maelstrom, actress Marie-Josée Croze had been appearing in both Canadian and American films since the early '90s. A Quebec native who got her start on a Canadian television drama entitled Le Choix (1990), bilingual Croze would subsequently appear in a pair of television series in the Great White North before making her stateside debut with the 1993 made-for-television drama Zelda. Later alternating between French and English-language productions, Croze's widest early exposure came with the much maligned box-office flop Battlefield Earth. Maelstrom provided a quick recovery that very same year, and Croze's heartfelt performance as a woman suffering with guilt following an abortion provided the perfect counter-weight to the failure of Battlefield Earth. Soon elevated to leading-lady status in such films as Des Chiens dans la Neige and Ascension (both 2002), Croze retained her critical-darling status with director Denys Arcand's follow-up to The Decline of the American Empire, The Barbarian Invasions (2003). That same year Croze would lighten things up a bit with a role in Cube director Vincenzo Natali's existential comedy Nothing.

~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide