Rebecca Marder

Rebecca Marder is a French film and stage actress who holds dual citizenship in France and the United States. She was born on 10 April 1995 in Paris, France. Her father, Marc Marder, is an American musician of Jewish background, and her mother, Mathilde de La Bardonnie, is a Catholic French journalist and theatre critic who wrote for Le Monde and Libération.

Marder began formal artistic training between 2008 and 2011 at the Conservatoire à rayonnement communal du 13e arrondissement de Paris. Although she went on to pursue studies in literature and cinema, she interrupted her coursework in September 2014 to join the drama school of the National Theatre of Strasbourg, where she studied for ten months.

Her acting career began at five years old when she appeared as Charlotte in the 2001 feature film Ceci est mon corps. In 2007, she appeared in Demandez la permission aux enfants alongside Pascal Légitimus and Sandrine Bonnaire. She later starred in the 2010 film The Round Up with Jean Reno and Mélanie Laurent. In 2012, Marder received the Prix du jeune espoir féminin at the Festival de la fiction TV de La Rochelle for her performance in Alain Tasma's television film Emma.

Following a collective audition, Marder was discovered by Éric Ruf, general administrator of the Comédie-Française. She signed a contract on 19 June 2015, becoming a salaried pensionnaire with the troupe. At 20 years old, she was the youngest of the troupe's 59 actors at the time and one of the youngest pensionnaires in its history. She made her debut as Lucietta in Carlo Goldoni's Les Rustres and regularly performed classical roles, including Claudine in Molière's George Dandin ou le Mari confondu and La Jalousie du Barbouillé, Atalide in Jean Racine's Bajazet, and Hermione in Euripides' Electra and Orestes. She announced her resignation from the Comédie-Française in 2022.

In 2020, Marder served as narrator for the Cambodian documentary Irradiated, which competed for the Golden Bear at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival and featured a score composed by her father. She played the lead role in Sandrine Kiberlain's 2021 directorial debut A Radiant Girl, portraying a young Jewish aspiring actress in occupied Paris in 1942. The film premiered in the Critics' Week section of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, competing for the Caméra d'Or, and earned Marder nominations for the César Award for Most Promising Actress and the Lumière Award for Best Female Revelation.

Marder portrayed a young Simone Veil in Olivier Dahan's 2022 biographical drama Simone Veil, A Woman of the Century. That same year, she starred in Sylvain Desclous's Grand Expectations, receiving her second César Award nomination for Most Promising Actress.

In 2023, Marder starred alongside Nadia Tereszkiewicz in François Ozon's 1930s-set crime comedy The Crime Is Mine, playing a lawyer defending her roommate on grounds of self-defense. She collaborated with Ozon again in 2025, playing Marie Cardona in The Stranger, an adaptation of the novel by Albert Camus.