Born in Paris, Isabelle Huppert made her big-screen debut in 1972. Since then she has starred in films including Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991), Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and Amour (2012), and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (2016). Huppert has been nominated for 16 César awards, twice winning for best actress, and has won a Bafta and two Cannes best actress awards. Her role in Paul Verhoeven’s controversial Elle (2016) earned Huppert an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe. She stars in Haneke’s latest film, Happy End, a black comedy about a bourgeois family living in Calais, in cinemas from 1 December.

1 | Book

Tiens ferme ta couronne by Yannick Haenel

I loved this book, which has just won the Prix Médicis, one of the biggest literary prizes in France. It’s about an imaginary meeting with the late director Michael Cimino: the narrator is obsessed with well-known figures from contemporary film-making, including Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola. It’s funny, extremely well written and very touching, and speaks about literature and love and creation. Another book I liked a lot recently is Montpelier Parade by the Irish-American writer Karl Geary. The funny thing is, I was shooting a movie in Ireland in the same neighbourhood where the book takes place. It was a very strange feeling.

2 | Music

Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker

I was thinking about Leonard Cohen’s last songs recently, his last record. He was a poet – he enchanted us for so many years. He’s absolutely wonderful, and I have always been a fan of his music. What I liked about the album is the same as what I always liked about him: it’s his poetry, and there’s something so soft about his voice. I never saw him perform, but I saw him once, briefly, in a restaurant. He was very solitary.

3 | Art

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, MoMA, New York

Usually when I am in any town I’ll go to museums. In New York I saw a wonderful exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, of Louise Bourgeois’s drawings. I love Bourgeois, as many people do, but these were the drawings she did at the very end of her life. It was remarkable to see how creative she was to the end. She speaks so much about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a mother. There is something so feminine in her works; she really speaks about that. There was also an exhibition about Frank Lloyd Wright.

4 | Musical

Hello, Dolly!, Shubert theatre, New York

I saw this musical recently in New York, with Bette Midler. She is outstanding – I was amazed by what she does. It’s beyond performance. I was completely speechless. She does something almost Chaplinesque sometimes, like a mime, with her face. The precision of her gestures, of her looks, the way she moves her little finger – everything is expressive. Her body language technique is amazing, and of course so is her voice. I’m not necessarily a fan of musical theatre, but I thought this was quite accomplished.

5 | TV

Big Little Lies (Sky Atlantic)

I’m not a viewer of television series usually, but I was shooting a movie in Toronto recently and I had time to watch this wonderful series directed by the Canadian film-maker Jean-Marc Vallée. It’s about the everyday life of mothers in a small town in America, and about relationships, family life, living in a small community, and how women deal with their husbands, with their children. I thought everything was brilliant – the acting, the direction, the style. Nicole Kidman is absolutely wonderful, as well as Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley. Plus it’s not too long, so you can watch it all in almost one go.

6 | Theatre

The Glass Menagerie, Belasco, New York

In my last stay in New York I saw this play on Broadway directed by Sam Gold, starring Sally Field. I loved it. The performances were great, and there was something very contemporary in the staging, which gives Tennessee Williams something so modern. You have different ways to approach him. I’ve done Tennessee Williams myself – Streetcar [Named Desire, in 2010] with French-Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski. It’s possible to make Williams contemporary, and I think Sam Gold completely succeeded. For example, everybody was on stage all the time. So even when a character was not in the scene being performed, they would still be on stage, silently witnessing the action. It gives something very new and real to the play.

7 | Film

The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)

I just finished shooting The Widow with Neil Jordan, and as I was filming I watched The Crying Game again. I hadn’t seen it for a long time and really enjoyed it. It’s very political, and unusual because you start with one story and all of a sudden that story ends – it’s completely free in its form. Of course there is a connection between the first story and the rest of the film, but the way the director jumps from the beginning into the second part is unexpected. I really like that.