If you were into art-house cinema in the 1990s, you were into Julie Delpy, whether it was her boho-romantic Celine in Richard Linklater's classic "Before Sunrise," her ice-cold vixen in Krzysztof Kieslowski's magisterial "Three Colors: White," or even the clichéd hooker-with-a-heart in Roger "Pulp Fiction" Avary's "Killing Zoe."

Delpy could easily have gone on to coast in Hollywood as another pretty face with a French accent (they need one every generation), but she took the money from her career and poured it into studying filmmaking at New York University. By age 25, she had directed a promising short, "Blah Blah Blah," which displayed a great sense of humor that the casting agents clearly hadn't detected.

After a hesitant start with "Looking For Jimmy," her first feature in 2002, she hit it out of the park in 2007 with "2 Days in Paris," a comedy that featured Delpy and old friend Adam Goldberg as a French-American couple who experience a relationship meltdown while visiting her parents. (Delpy cast her real parents, Albert Delpy and Marion Pillet, with great results.)