Brigitte Sy

Over the course of an esoteric career, French actress and director Brigitte Sy has been best known for her marriage to and longstanding collaboration with with maverick director Philippe Garrel, creator of some of the most uncompromisingly arty dramas in his country's history. Though Sy's first small part came in the unpromisingly titled 1979 softcore film "Memoirs Of A French Whore," Garrel gave the actress her first important role in his 1983 drama "Liberte, la nuit," the same year Garrel and Sy had their first child, actor Louis Garrel. Sy played the wife of a Hungarian puppeteer, but wouldn't appear on screen or work with her husband again for another five years.

Garrel turned his wife's disappointment over not receiving a part into one of his films into the 1989 relationship drama "Emergency Kisses," with husband and wife playing fictionalized versions of themselves. In 1990, Sy revealed in an interview that she was HIV-positive, the result of a relationship with a former drug addict. After collaborating with Garrel on his 1991 drama "J'entends plus la guitare," their relationship ended. Sy wouldn't make another film with her former partner for fourteen years, when she played the mother of their son Louis, the protagonist of 2005's "Regular Lovers." Following in her former partner's autobiographical footsteps, in 2010 Sy made her feature film debut as a director with the prison drama "Free Hands." Drawing upon 10 years of prison volunteer work, Sy's drama cast Israeli director Ronit Elkabetz as her HIV-positive on-screen alter-ego.