On Oscar Sunday, the oldest woman to have ever received a nomination for the coveted Best Actress title will also be ringing in her 86th birthday. While we’ve become accustomed to the French actress’s short gray hair, moving blank stare, and delicately wrinkled face immortalized by her entrancing role in Amour, it’s easy to forget that this actress possessed the same acting chops in her younger years.
In 1959, Riva captivated audiences as a French New Wave beauty simply called “She” in Alan Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, where she played an actress engaged in an short-lived but intense affair with a Japanese architect called “He” post-Hiroshima. Click through the slideshow to take a step back into Riva’s history, complete with stills from films like Recourse in Grace, Thérèse Desqueyroux, and Le Gros Coup, where she appears as gorgeous and demure in her classic short bob (that grew lighter and darker over the years) as she does today.