Early Life
Isabelle Yasmine Adjani was born in an immigrant neighborhood Gennevilliers, Hauts-de-Seine, a suburb of Paris to an Algerian father from Constantine, Algeria.
In an interview in 1985, Adjani explained why her mother Augusta used to say her husband, Mohammed Cherif Adjani, was of Turkish origin as she was ashamed of his Algerian origin. She also asked him to change his first name to Cherif as it sounded more "American". Mohammed Cherif Adjani, was a soldier in the French Army in World War II. Her mother Augusta, called "Gusti", was German.
Adjani grew up bi-lingual, speaking German and French fluently.
After winning a school recitation contest, Adjani began acting in amateur theater by the age of twelve.
Read more about this topic: Isabelle Adjani
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)