She has exactly the exotic good looks and captivating accent you’d expect for someone born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and who grew up in France. I just happened to have remembered her when I popped in a DVD of a 10 year old movie last night. One of the movie previews was of The Artist (2012). It put her on the map and was a thoroughly enjoyable “silent movie”. Her costar was a Fredric March lookalike who was fun, but she held the screen. The movie was essentially written for her by her husband.

Her IMDB bio has a lot of “reading between the lines“. If I understand her career path correctly, she was more interested in quality of work rather than quantity. She explains more about this in a recent video interview from Variety. The side benefit is you can stare at that face while immersed in her accent. The crime of course is how much we’ve missed and will never see of incredible talent such as hers and similar actresses like Nina Hoss. Hollywood has such a monopoly here that they jealously guard with every fiber of their no-talent being between production, distribution and marketing.

If they don’t want you to see a movie, chances are you won’t. A foreign film will be released to about 70 art houses across the country for 2 weeks and then it will be gone. 1 foreign film will be recognized by the Oscars and Americans will never see the hundreds of others released each year. Hollywood doesn’t own the rights to them. Therefore they use the power of their vertical monopoly to make sure you never do. I first saw this in operation about the same time as that 2012 time period.

A Danish film came out called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Noomi Rapace). So few Americans saw the foreign version with subtitles, that when Hollywood did their “copy and paste” job with their version, Americans thought it was original material! Ha! Hollywood hasn’t had an original idea in 40 years (since 1977). My point of all this is after you see and listen to Berenice, Nina and Noomi, you start to wonder, how many other European actresses of incredible talent and beauty have I missed because of our closed movie system?