Global flair

For French actress Marion Cotillard, it’s not the directors, the scene, or even the casting grind that can make Hollywood exhausting. It’s the accents.

The “Inception” star is the rare performer with a flourishing career in both the United States and continental Europe. But even after nearly a dozen English-speaking roles, getting her mouth around the words is still tricky.

“I tried to do it for a little while without a dialect coach,” she said by phone from Paris, in nearly flawless (but accented) English. “I couldn’t do it. I have trouble even with the coach. There are so many subtleties in English, just in the way you stress the words. And words are a big part of how you act.”

Switching between languages, both the literal and filmic kinds, is a feat few performers can manage. But as the Cannes Film Festival kicks off this week, the spotlight will be on two Oscar-winning actresses with different backgrounds who display that versatility.

Cotillard stars in “Midnight in Paris,” a Woody Allen romantic comedy that opened the festival Wednesday night. It’s a perfect showcase for the 35-year-old’s two-continent status -- she plays a period Frenchwoman who speaks English.

She sandwiched the part between two movies that couldn’t be more different: an intimate French-language dramedy called “Little White Lies” directed by her romantic partner, Guillaume Canet, and the upcoming comic-book sequel “The Dark Knight Rises,” which reunites her with “Inception” director Christopher Nolan.

On Saturday, Penelope Cruz will help unveil her movie, Disney’s 3-D extravaganza “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.” The Spaniard -- who made her first major blip on American radars in 2001 opposite Tom Cruise in “Vanilla Sky” (after playing the role in the Spanish-language original) -- came to this festival in 2009 with a very different film: Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces.”

In “Pirates,” she plays a swashbuckling foil to Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow -- the confident Angelica, who tries to one-up Sparrow, flirt with him and help find the Fountain of Youth all at the same time.

Cruz said she doesn’t intentionally alternate between the U.S. and Europe, but it often works out that way. “It seems to happen in a natural way,” she said by phone from Los Angeles. “After I finish doing a movie and I start reading scripts, I naturally pick something that’s the opposite.”

Cruz, 37, will continue the continental shuffle by following “Pirates” with an Italian-language movie with director Sergio Castellitto, then a Rome-based film that Allen is making.

Building a transatlantic career isn’t easy. Few non-native English speakers become bona-fide Hollywood stars. Those who do usually leave their homelands behind. But an increasingly multilingual international acting community, plus Hollywood’s belief that foreign actors expand a movie’s appeal globally, has led more performers to attempt the two-continent trick.

Cruz’s husband, Javier Bardem, of course, was a star in Spain before crossing over to American films and winning an Oscar for “No Country for Old Men.” But the dearth of juicy female roles in Hollywood makes it harder for women. Noomi Rapace recently leveraged her star turn as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish-language Millennium trilogy into a role in “Prometheus,” the sort-of prequel to “Alien.” Time will tell if she’ll pull it off.

Both Cruz and Cotillard say they benefited from working with directors in their home countries who are on Hollywood’s radar: Cruz, via her frequent collaborations with Almodovar, and Cotillard in the Luc Besson-stewarded franchise “Taxi,” as well as with American auteurs such as Tim Burton (“Big Fish”).

Born 17 months apart, the Paris-raised Cotillard and Madrid native Cruz came to acting in different ways, but their careers have converged in recent years. Cotillard hails from a family of performers, solidly middle class, and began acting at a young age.

Cruz is from a working-class background and spent much of her teens and 20s studying dance.

They won their Oscars a year apart, Cotillard in 2008 for her playing singer Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose” and Cruz in 2009 for her supporting role in Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

They also costarred in the 2009 musical remake “Nine.” They even were pregnant at the same time (Cruz gave birth this year; Cotillard is due soon.)

Producers say performers such as Cotillard and Cruz could stand at the head of a burgeoning new group as Hollywood goes more international.

“Whenever I’m starting to cast a new movie, I’m always thinking about who could help me in Europe or other places,” said “Fast Five” producer Neal Moritz, who recently cast German actor Christoph Waltz in a film.

A few years ago, the Dutch actress Carice van Houten seemed to be on the brink of following in Cruz’s and Cotillard’s footsteps. She was coming off one of the most lauded roles of the year, the 2006 World War II drama “Black Book,” in which she played a beautiful, clever member of the Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Holland, switching deftly between languages.

“Right after it happened, I got roles in ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘Repo Men,’” she said, referring to two mainstream Hollywood productions, “and I thought it would be easy. But it’s been a little frustrating since then.”

Soon after those roles, the parts dried up, and Van Houten grew weary of trying to convince Hollywood of her English skills and appeal. She said that while the movies she coveted felt bigger, the roles, when she could get them, felt smaller. She now concentrates on her home country, though she’s working on at least one American TV project.

“There are all these things I don’t have to deal with in my home country, questions about whether I’m bankable enough. And then when you do get a part, it’s usually to do things that aren’t as interesting as in my home country.”

Cotillard has had the kind of breakthrough Van Houten never got. She played the ethereal Mal in “Inception,” a character that brought a bit of European mystery to a U.S. blockbuster. Indeed, Mal’s very existence seemed nebulous.

“I think I’m very attracted to very mysterious characters, so it might be that I attract the very mysterious characters as well,” she said.

In “Paris,” Cotillard’s character, a kind of muse for Owen Wilson’s nostalgia-minded writer, radiates a similar aura. “She’s very present and very mysterious at the same time,” Cotillard said. “What I had to do was make it real and simple, but also make it someone inspiring.”

Cruz too said taking on a big production such as “Pirates” gave her pause. “You do worry about working on a huge production,” she said. “But I realized that there were a lot of layers to Angelica. She’s bossy and playful and clever.”

Cruz said she’d like to continue alternating between Hollywood and Europe. Cotillard offers a bit more je ne sais quoi. “I don’t really calculate anything,” she said. “I go where my blood takes me.”

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steve.zeitchik@latimes.com