New Project: Isabelle Huppert is to star with Jacques Dutronc in Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le chocolat, a psychological drama set in Switzerland. It will be Isabelle's sixth project with Chabrol, her favourite director. Filming is scheduled for spring 2000.

March 8th 2000: Release date of Benoît Jacquot's La fausse suivante, an adaption of the play by Marivaux, filmed in minimalist style in a bare Paris theatre and co-starring Sandrine Kiberlain, Pierre Arditi and Mathieu Amalric.

March 1st 2000: Release date of Laurence Ferreira Barbosa's La vie moderne. The film interweaves the stories of three strangers who each find different ways of coping with their loneliness: Claire (Isabelle Huppert), teenager Marguerite (played by Isabelle's real-life daughter Lolita Chammah, pictured above) and unemployed Jacques (Frédéric Pierrot).

October 20th 1999: Release of Benoît Jacquot's Pas de scandale. Isabelle Huppert pays Agnès, the wife of Grégoire (Fabrice Luchini), a businessman who undergoes a change of personality after spending several months in prison. With Vahina Giocante and Vincent Lindon.

September 29th 1999: Isabelle Huppert received the Légion d'honneur from Catherine Trautmann, the French minister of culture.

September 1st-11th 1999: Isabelle attended the 56th Venice Film Festival, to present her new film, Pas de scandale.

August 1999: Isabelle is filming Destinées sentimentales with director Olivier Assayas and co-star Emmanuelle Béart (qv). The screenplay is adapted from the novel by Jacques Chardonne, set in the early part of the century, about a porcelain manufacturer who leaves America to make his fortune in Limoges. Shooting schedule is 6 weeks; release date is July 12th 2000.

Other new projects in her busy schedule include Clara (a bio-pic of the wife of the composer Robert Schumann, focussing on her adulterous relationship with Johannes Brahms), Patricia Mazuy's Saint-Cyr (filming began in January 1999), Raul Ruiz's Fils de deux mères (December 8th 1999 to January 15th 2000, with Jeanne Balibar and Charles Berling, from a novel by Massimo Bontempelli), Yves Simoneau's The Ex (a TV film with Kevin Kline), Arthur Penn's Borderland and Pascal Thomas's Les mercredis (a comedy with Antoine de Caunes and Nathalie Baye).

In July 2000, she will appear as Medea in the play by Euripides at the Avignon Festival.