Isabelle Huppert was born in 1953, in Paris, France. However she spent her childhood in Ville d'Avray. Her mother was a teacher of Enligh language. After being encouraged by her mother, she followed the Conservatory of Versailles, where she won an acting prize for her work in Alfred de Musset's "Un caprice".
She later studied at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique and then followed an illustrious theatrical career, which includes Ivan Turgenev's "A Month in the Country", Euripides' "Medea" (title role) etc. She made her movie debut in 1971 and soon became one of the top actresses of her generation, giving fine performances in very important films, like Claude Goretta's Dentellière, La (1977), as a simple-minded girl who falls in love with - and is betrayed by - a student, Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), as a prostitute, and Maurice Pialat's Loulou (1980), as an upper-class woman who is physically attracted by a young vagabond.
She made her US debut playing a brothel madam in Michael Cimino's disastrous Heaven's Gate (1980) and has an extremely productive collaboration with Claude Chabrol, who cast her in several movies, including Violette Nozière (1978), in which she played a young woman who murders her parents, and Une affaire de femmes (1988), in which she gave an excellent performance as a shameless abortionist, the last woman to be executed in France. More recent good films include Patricia Mazuy's Saint-Cyr (2000) and Michael Haneke's controversial Pianiste, La (2001), as a sexually repressed piano teacher.

Some praises written for Isabelle Huppert:
* David Thomson on Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary: "[Huppert] has to rate as one of the most accomplished actresses in the world today, even if she seems short of the passion or agony of her contemporary, Isabelle Adjani"
* Stuart Jeffries of The Observer on The Piano Teacher: "This is surely one of the greatest performances of Huppert's already illustrious acting career, though it is one that is very hard to watch."
* Director, Michael Haneke: "[Huppert] has such professionalism, the way she is able to represent suffering. At one end you have the extreme of her suffering and then you have her icy intellectualism. No other actor can combine the two."