How Marion Cotillard fell out of love with fame: “I don’t want buckets of shit in my face”

Posted On October 1, 2025October 1, 2025

When Marion Cotillard first left France to begin making movies in Hollywood, fame quickly grabbed the beautiful and talented young star in its clutches.

When suddenly thrust into the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown and having it craft your existence, the allure of the shiner aspects of life can be hard to parry. So, after Cotillard appeared in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year in 2006 and the following year turned up a pioneering Oscar-winning performance as the tragic and rebellious singer Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, she found every door in the industry suddenly wide open for her, and it was intoxicating.

In this, the socially and environmentally conscious star loved that fame gave her the platform to bring attention to the issues she truly cared about, which she figured could only be a boon to her longstanding membership of Greenpeace and ambassadorial roles for other organisations such as the Maud Fontenoy Foundation and the Association Wayanga. This is a woman so fiercely dedicated to making the world open its eyes to climate change that she once considered quitting acting to join Greenpeace full-time. For a number of years, Cotillard played the game as one of Hollywood’s most prominent and outspoken activists.

However, her genuine belief in being able to effect change began to be poisoned by the relentless backlash she faced from certain quarters. You know the ones; the people who say an actor can’t have a political or social opinion because they’re rich, and therefore must be wildly out of touch with reality. 

“I became a celebrity and found out that the light I could put on some subjects was amazing for them,” Cotillard told The Times in 2025 with great earnestness, “That they needed it. However, then some people started to think I didn’t have the right to give my voice to this or that cause, because I was not living in the same world as other people anymore.” 

Over time, Cotillard began to feel judged for being famous, and she bristled as a perception of her lifestyle that wasn’t even remotely true was projected to the world at large; to the tabloids, she was a pampered actor who spent all her time swanning around on yachts or taking fuel-guzzling private jets to fly halfway around the world for dinner at a posh restaurant.

“I did that once, and there was paparazzi there,” Cotillard raged about her solitary time embracing this celebrity cliche, “It was ten, 15 years ago, the first and last time I went on a fucking yacht.” As for the private jets, she admitted she’s flown on them a couple of times in her life, but nowhere near the number of times the press would have people believe. 

Eventually, she became exhausted with their narrative and began to believe that her profile was hurting the organisations she was part of, instead of helping them, and feeling like an albatross around the neck of Greenpeace was so depressing that she had to admit the media had won. Therefore, with regret, she reduced her presence as an activist, another victim of the double-edged sword that is fame and fortune.

“At first, I thought, ‘OK, if it helps, I don’t mind taking buckets of shit in my face’,” the Morning Show star confessed, “But now I don’t want buckets of shit in my face anymore”.

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