Rebecca Marder

Precocity as a Method

Rebecca Marder joined the Comédie-Française at just twenty years old. She was the youngest member of the institution since the days of Isabelle Adjani. Her entry in 2015 was no accident but the result of a childhood surrounded by sheet music and scripts in the heart of Paris.

Her father is American composer Marc Marder, and her mother is Bulgarian actress Natalia Dontcheva. She grew up watching how a character is built from the kitchen at home. But her real training took place on the stage of the French National Theatre, where she spent seven seasons performing classics by Molière and Chekhov.

Theater was his headquarters.

In 2021, she decided to leave the security of a permanent company and move into film for good. Sandrine Kiberlain gave her the script for Une jeune fille qui va bien, and her name began to circulate beyond specialist circles. She played a young Jewish woman in Paris in 1942 who just wants to be an actress while the world falls apart around her.

The Weight of French Memory

That same 2021, she took on the challenge of playing the young version of Simone Veil in the film Simone, le voyage du siècle. She had to shoot scenes of considerable physical harshness to recreate the experience of the concentration camps. The film drew more than two million moviegoers in French commercial theaters.

François Ozon called her in 2023 to star in Mon crime alongside Nadia Tereszkiewicz. In this screwball comedy set in the 1930s, she plays an unemployed lawyer who defends her best friend against a murder charge. Critics praised her ability to keep up a fast comic rhythm in a genre she had not explored until then.

And the gamble paid off.

Marder doesn't go for the easy comfort of the leading role. In 2023 she also shot De grandes espérances under the direction of Sylvain Desclous. In this political thriller, she plays a working-class young woman who tries to break into the elite of French power while hiding a dark secret from her past.

In 2024 she took part in the project La Molière, directed by Olivier Py. In February 2023, she received her César nomination for Best Actress Revelation for her work with Kiberlain. Her contract with the Chanel brand as a brand ambassador was signed months after she officially left the Comédie-Française.