10 Greatest Actors Turned Directors

The enormously versatile Jule Delpy is good at just about anything. She is perhaps best known for the Before series (Sunrise, Sunset, Midnight), the latter two of which she also wrote. Aside from these, she has made a career in directing highly accomplished, ever so European relationship movies, for which she often composes the score as well just to put the rest of us to shame.

Best known are 2 Days In Paris, and its similarly titled sequel set in New York. Delpy coaxes great performances out of her American co-stars (Adam Goldberg, Chris Rock) and paints a sensitive and funny portrait of motherhood and finding romance. The films are somewhat autobiographical, but unlike other artists writing about themselves she has an interest in the world around her, too, with sexual politics and race being key themes.

2009’s The Countess saw Delpy tackle historical drama (again pulling a quadruple shift as director, star, writer, and composer), and her latest, My Zoe, is an often heartbreaking look at motherhood. While she’s yet to have a hit on the level of the Before films, it seems there’s nothing she can’t do.