Pauline Clément, the Comédie-Française actress who learned her timing in sketches

Pauline Clément

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	November 8, 1986 Évry, France
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Specials, C'est la vie!, Comédie-Française

Pauline Clément belongs to the most codified institution in French theatre and to its least solemn generation. On the stage of the Salle Richelieu she speaks Feydeau and Molière, under the rules of a troupe founded under Louis XIV. A large part of her comic timing, though, was learned somewhere else entirely: in short sketches written with friends and released online and on Canal+. For years the two careers ran side by side without touching. Her most personal film so far makes one the subject of the other, a backstage comedy set inside the Comédie-Française, co-written by Clément and acted by her colleagues in the rooms where they actually work.

Nothing in her schooling pointed toward the classical stage. She grew up between the suburbs of Essonne and Paris, and in a portrait in the newspaper Libération she traced her trouble in class to learning disorders, dyscalculia and dysorthographia, which steered her onto vocational courses. She left with a CAP, a French vocational diploma in beauty care, before she discovered the theatre.

Évry, the new town south of Paris where she was born on 8 November 1986, is not the usual starting point for an actress of the Comédie-Française. The training came afterwards and fast. Clément enrolled at the Cours Florent, moved to the municipal conservatoire of the 8th arrondissement and then won a place at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique, the country’s top drama school, where she studied from 2011 to 2014. She prepared the entrance audition with Bertrand Usclat, who became her most constant creative partner. With him she joined Yes vous aime, a collective of actors who write and film their own sketches, and helped create Broute, a satirical short format broadcast by Canal+ that reached an audience the Comédie-Française rarely touches.

The house called almost immediately. Clément first played the Salle Richelieu in Labiche’s An Italian Straw Hat, staged by Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, and entered the troupe as a pensionnaire in 2015. The repertoire since then has been wide: Karl Kraus’s Les Derniers Jours de l’humanité for David Lescot, Schnitzler’s La Ronde for Anne Kessler, Ivo van Hove’s Euripides diptych Électre / Oreste, Denis Podalydès’s Les Fourberies de Scapin, Lilo Baur’s The Miser and Clément Hervieu-Léger’s The Cherry Orchard. She has said she felt illegitimate when she arrived, convinced she lacked the literary culture of her colleagues, and that the company’s head, Éric Ruf, valued her instinct and her freedom on stage over any of that.

The role that brought her wider notice was Lucienne in Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, directed by Lilo Baur. It earned her a nomination for the Molière for best female newcomer in 2020, the French theatre’s main award, and she has gone back to the part since. On screen the progression was slower and almost entirely comic: the bride in Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache’s C’est la vie! in 2017, Myriam in the same directors’ The Specials in 2019, a role in Jean-Paul Rouve’s Lola et ses frères, Mademoiselle Jolibois in two Les Blagues de Toto films, Chloé in Olivier Baroux’s Menteur. In 2022 she created, wrote and starred in Moitié·e·s, a Canal+ mini-series about the different ways people manage to love each other.

That split is also the weak point in the story. Le Parisien grouped her in 2025 with the Comédie-Française actors who move between Molière and mass-market comedy, under the line that an actor must be able to play everything, and she defends that balance. Yet the screen record still lags far behind the stage one. Most of her film work has been supporting parts in broad commercial comedies that use a fraction of what she does at the Richelieu, and her first real lead, as Clémence in Jean-Luc Gaget’s Une fille en or opposite Arthur Dupont, opened in April 2026 to a polite reception, with French critics averaging 2.8 out of 5 on AlloCiné. Cinema has not yet written for her what the theatre already knows how to use.

The past year has gone some way toward closing the gap. On 1 January 2026 she became the 546th sociétaire of the Comédie-Française, a full partner in the company with a vote in its affairs, voted in alongside Noam Morgensztern, Claire de La Rüe du Can and Gaël Kamilindi. In February she appeared opposite André Dussollier and Miou-Miou in Emmanuel Patron’s family comedy Chers parents, and at the César ceremony she presented the costume award with Marina Hands in a voluminous gown that snagged on the set until she ripped herself free, a moment the magazine Trois Couleurs counted among the funniest of the evening.

The bigger event was De la Comédie-Française, directed by Martin Darondeau and Bertrand Usclat and co-written by Clément with both of them and Clémence Dargent. She plays Nina, a stage director trying to hold a production of Macbeth together three hours before opening night, with Benjamin Lavernhe, Laurent Stocker, Marina Hands, Julien Frison and Guillaume Gallienne from the real troupe around her. The film won four prizes at the Alpe d’Huez comedy festival in January, a record for the event, including the jury and audience awards, and reached French cinemas on 22 July. Clément has described it as a film for everyone, not only for theatre people.

The next steps lean further into cinema. She is in the cast of Emmanuel Mouret’s Le Cabinet du docteur Albertini, a thriller comedy shot earlier this year with Laure Calamy and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and of Animal sauvage, Prime Video‘s six-episode adaptation of Joël Dicker’s novel with Noémie Merlant and Matthias Schoenaerts, expected in 2027. Jean-Christophe Meurisse has also cast her in La fête est finie, his satire set on a private beach during the Cannes festival. None of these is a release date yet. They are, for the first time, a slate of auteur projects rather than studio comedies, and the question her career now asks is whether French cinema will hand her the kind of role the Salle Richelieu has been giving her for a decade.

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Tags: actors, actresses, French cinema, Bertrand Usclat, Comédie-Française, Pauline Clément

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