Tonie Marshall

Tonie Marshall (29 November 1951 – 12 March 2020) was a French-American actress, screenwriter, and film director. In 2000, she became the first female director to win a César award for her film Venus Beauty Institute. Life and career Marshall was the daughter of American actor, director, and bandleader William Marshall and French actress Micheline Presle. She was also the aunt of model and actress Sarah Marshall, and the half-sister of actor Mike Marshall, son of the actress Michèle Morgan. Before becoming a director, Tonie Marshall was an actress, first in drama and then in television and film, where she played several little parts in the 1970s and 1980s. As she recalls on his beginning on-screen: "I was an actress because it was what seemed the more natural for me, but I was interested a lot in writing and production. I was quite afraid not to make it [directing films]. Because I was a little actress, that I did not attend a specialized school, that I did not have any technique". During her childhood, she also developed her experience of films thanks to the arthouse cinema of the Ursulines in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, near which she grew up. After performing minor parts in several of Jacques Demy's films, including A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973) and La Naissance du Jour (1980), Marshall directed her first film, Pentimento (1990), offering the radio and television host Antoine de Caunes his first role in cinema.