Do we like them?

Do we like Isabelle Huppert?

Our score: 7 out of 10. No harmful words, court cases or credible allegations turned up, plus public support for women and LGBTQ+ audiences, but the record is thin.

The freshest news is a proper career milestone. On 2 July 2026 the board of the Cinémathèque française elected her president for a three-year term to 2029, taking over from Costa-Gavras, who had held the job since 2007. She's the first woman in the chair since 1936, with directors Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis as her vice-presidents.

On women, the clearest thing on the record is #MeToo. At the 2018 Berlin festival she said she'd watched the movement with “a lot of sympathy and hope”. She also said she was glad things had finally been brought out into the open. That's a straightforward, supportive position, with no hedging we could find in that coverage.

She's also shown up for people overseas. In October 2022 she was one of the French actors who cut locks of their hair in an Instagram video in solidarity with Iranian women protesting after Mahsa Amini's death. It's a small gesture rather than a campaign, but it came as more than 1,000 French film professionals signed a petition backing the protesters.

For the LGBTQ+ side of the ledger, she's been warm and relaxed. In a 2019 interview about Greta, she said the film's winking humour might land with LGBTQ viewers, and that it was for anyone with “a little bit of taste, a little bit of openness”. Asked whether her character could be queer, she answered, “Oh, she could be!”

The harm check came up clean, with honest gaps. We found no harmful words, no slide into conspiracy theories, and no troubling company in what we read. We also found no court outcomes against her and no credible allegations. Nothing turned up from her on trans issues either way, so we can't say more than that.

The honest limit is how much there is to go on. This is mostly a long career of playing hard, unsentimental women on screen, with few public political stands, and the stands we did find are all on the side of women and equality. That makes a solid pass rather than a gold star.