Possessing skin the quality of alabaster, the luminously beautiful Parisian-born Julie Delpy acted for some of the best directors in Europe long before her 20th birthday. The daughter of actors, she made her stage debut at age five and appeared on the big screen for the first time before she was 10. Although she worked occasionally during the ensuing years, her career began in earnest with Jean Luc-Godard's "Detective" (1985), after which Delpy gained her first real attention in Godard disciple Leos Carax's "Mauvais sang/Bad Blood", followed by her first starring role in Bertrand Tavernier's "Beatrice" (both 1986), playing a 14th Century victim of incest and rape. After reteaming with Godard for her first English-language film, "King Lear" (1987), she portrayed a nun, the Virgin Mary and a temptress in Carlos Saura's "The Dark Night" (1989).
Delpy moved to the United States in 1990 but continued collaborating with European directors and raising her international profile further. In Agnieszka Holland's true-life chronicle "Europa, Europa" (1990), she played a beautiful yet ideologically repulsive young German who, in her flirtations with the Jewish protagonist, displays both the blind obstinacy of Nazi youth and the allure of a young girl coming into womanhood. In Volker Schlondorff's "Voyager" (1991, adapted from Max Frisch's German classic "Homo Faber"), she encounters Sam Shepard's world-weary middle-aged engineer on board a ship sailing to Paris. Inventing excuses to run into him, the precocious young thing wears down his initial resistance until her charms and almost unbearably fragile beauty take effect. Shortly after they become lovers when Shepard realizes she may be his daughter, the tale becomes truly gripping with its overtones of Greek tragedy that keep the audience guessing up to the very end.
Delpy's character Dominique appeared in all the segments of Kryztsztof Kieslowski's "Trois couleurs/Three Colors" trilogy, her small roles in "Bleu/Blue" (1993) and "Rouge/Red" (1994) sandwiched around a compelling star turn in "Blanc/White" (also 1994). The beautiful, haughty, unforgiving and irresistible hairdresser of "White" was the very embodiment of France, divorcing her feckless and impotent Polish hairdresser husband only to reunite with him after his own funeral. Her first Hollywood film cast her in the Raquel Welch part (from Richard Lester's 70s "Musketeers" series) in Stephen Herek's 1993 remake of "The Three Musketeers", but she attracted more attention for her foray into Tarantinoesque violence and irony in Roger Avary's feature directing debut, "Killing Zoe" (1994), portraying the angelic French whore who captures the fancy of dimwit safecracker Eric Stoltz.
Building on the intensive summer session she spent at New York University's film school in 1988, Delpy wrote, directed and co-starred in the 12-minute short "Blah, Blah, Blah" (1995), a comical look at two sexually frustrated girls, which made a strong showing at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. She starred as French student Celine opposite Ethan Hawke's American tourist Jesse in Richard Linklater's unhurried romance "Before Sunrise" (1996) and then acted in her first horror flick, "An American Werewolf in Paris" (1997), playing a good girl who turns bad at the full moon. Some of her best opportunities in the late 90s came on the small screen as co-star of the NBC miniseries "Crime and Punishment" (1998) and as American Barbara Branden in the Showtime TV-movie "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (1999). She also co-starred opposite Adam Goldberg as a New York couple who drive one another crazy despite being in love in the 1999 ABC sitcom pilot "True Love". On the directing horizon, she helmed her debut feature "Tell Me" (lensed 1999), about a neurotic woman taken hostage by a dimwitted thief.