Though Adjani has starred in relatively few major films, her talent, glamour and tumultuous personality have made her a top French star since the late 1970s. She started very young in film (1969) and on stage, joining the Comédie Française in 1973. Claude Pinoteau's comedy La Gifle / The Slap (1974) and François Truffaut's drama L'Histoire d'Adèle H / The Story of Adèle H (1975) were her first important films. Though she continued making comedies (Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Tout feu tout flamme, 1981, Philomène Esposito's Toxic Affair, 1993), her dominant image is one of intensity, mystery and high drama, usually in auteur cinema. Her arresting beauty and assertiveness predisposed her for passionate and rebellious (often self-destructive) heroines, such as the daughter figures in Jean Becker's L'Été meurtrier / One Deadly Summer and Claude Miller's Mortelle Randonnée / Deadly Circuit (both 1983). Adjani was the target of a right-wing smear campaign in 1986, after she took up anti-National Front positions by claiming her Algerian antecedents. She nevertheless successfully produced (and starred in) Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel (1988), her powerful performance earning her her third César. While defining glamorous French femininity, Adjani, like Catherine Deneuve, projects a Hollywood-type aura of stardom, playfully evoked in Luc Besson's Subway (1985). Despite a three-year absence from the screen in the early 1990s and the failure of Toxic Affair, her place in the firmament of French stars is confirmed by her highly charged performance as the heroine of Patrice Chéreau's La Reine Margot (1994). She has subsequently taken part in several international productions, such as Jeremiah Checkhik's Diabolique (1996, US/France), a remake of the 1955 Les Diaboliques by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Ivan Passer's Benia ou le cavalier rouge (1996, France/Yugoslavia).