A friend of mine who’s a very intelligent moviegoer said of the performer Marion Cotillard that her acting seems so personal and delicate—like something between her and the character—that you just want to leave her alone with it and not analyze what’s going on. I think I agree. With some performers, talking about what they do feels intrusive, and not in the standard paparazzi kind of way. Like many other people, I became aware of Cotillard when she burned through the screen as Edith Piaf in Olivier Dahan’s 2007 film, “La Vie en Rose.” After that, I started to play catch-up.

Born in Paris in 1975, Cotillard is the daughter of two performers. Her father worked as a mime for a time, and her mother is an actress and a drama teacher. Cotillard began acting at an early age, most notably with Jean-Luc Godard’s muse Anna Karina in the French television series “Chloé.” Like the older star, Cotillard seems to fully inhabit her best roles, which often center on struggle and doubt conveyed through not too much dialogue. That’s part of Cotillard’s genius—letting silence be and not dressing it up with any “notice me” tricks. She knows what the camera can and cannot do to magnify or reduce what burns through the soul and becomes character.

Cotillard is a character actress who’s also a star. This summer, she makes her New York theatrical début in a fully staged reading of “Joan of Arc at the Stake,” directed by Côme de Bellescize. (Originally produced in Japan, for Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen festival, it’s the final production of the New York Philharmonic season, June 10-13, at Avery Fisher Hall, in French, with English supertitles.) Alongside the Philharmonic orchestra, Cotillard plays the martyred leader with an elegance that may bring to mind a scene in the 1962 Godard drama, “Vivre Sa Vie,” in which Karina sheds tears as she watches Falconetti weep in Dreyer’s 1928 film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”

Cotillard is, she says, living her own life. In an interview she gave after the birth of her son, now four, she said, “Having a child has not changed the way I act, but it does stop me from bringing drama home in the evening. Most of the time, my characters are not super happy, full of joy, singing and dancing. You have to protect a kid from a dark mood, and yet I don’t want to protect myself from my characters. It’s a struggle.” This is precisely what makes Cotillard one of the best actresses we have: her unqualified need for self-expression in any number of roles, and her willingness to go for it. ♦