"One is never ready for success. It consecrates and looses you at the same time"
About this Quote
Success, in Adjani's telling, is less a prize than a rite. "Consecrates" borrows the language of ceremony: you get anointed, made official, upgraded from promising to inevitable. For an actress especially, that sanctification is public and sticky. The industry stops treating you as a person who performs and starts treating you as a symbol of taste, of mystery, of "seriousness". You don't just win; you're declared.
Then comes the knife twist: it "looses you" at the same time. Not frees you in a breezy, self-help way, but unmoors you. Success loosens your ties to ordinary feedback, ordinary risk, ordinary failure-the stuff that used to keep your work agile and your ego calibrated. In acting, the moment you become bankable, you're paradoxically less free: you get protected, managed, mythologized, and pushed toward choices that preserve the brand rather than enlarge the artist. The looseness is psychic: a widening gap between who you are and what people insist you are.
Her opening clause, "One is never ready", refuses the bootstrappy fantasy that there's a finish line where you're finally prepared to be admired. Adjani came up in a French cinema culture that both worships and devours its icons; her career has been shadowed by intense scrutiny and periods of retreat. The line reads like hard-earned autobiography: fame as simultaneous coronation and displacement, a blessing that doubles as exile.
Then comes the knife twist: it "looses you" at the same time. Not frees you in a breezy, self-help way, but unmoors you. Success loosens your ties to ordinary feedback, ordinary risk, ordinary failure-the stuff that used to keep your work agile and your ego calibrated. In acting, the moment you become bankable, you're paradoxically less free: you get protected, managed, mythologized, and pushed toward choices that preserve the brand rather than enlarge the artist. The looseness is psychic: a widening gap between who you are and what people insist you are.
Her opening clause, "One is never ready", refuses the bootstrappy fantasy that there's a finish line where you're finally prepared to be admired. Adjani came up in a French cinema culture that both worships and devours its icons; her career has been shadowed by intense scrutiny and periods of retreat. The line reads like hard-earned autobiography: fame as simultaneous coronation and displacement, a blessing that doubles as exile.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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