Clémence Poésy

Clémence Poésy, born Clémence Guichard on 30 October 1982, is a French actor and fashion model whose screen work moves between French-language productions and international projects. She was born in L'Haÿ-les-Roses, in the Val-de-Marne department south of Paris. Her father, Étienne Guichard, worked as an actor and writer, while her mother was a teacher. She adopted “Poésy,” her mother’s maiden name, as her professional name. Poésy achieved wide international recognition as Fleur Delacour in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). Fleur, a student from France’s Beauxbatons Academy, becomes one of the Triwizard Tournament’s champions. Poésy returned to the part in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010) and Part 2 (2011), where Fleur marries Bill Weasley and joins the Order of the Phoenix’s resistance to Voldemort. Her other English-language film credits include Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008), in which she plays Chloë opposite Colin Farrell, and Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010). In the latter, she plays Rana, one of two hikers whom Aron Ralston meets before his canyoning accident in Utah; James Franco portrays Ralston. Poésy also played Isabelle Azaire opposite Eddie Redmayne in Birdsong, the 2012 BBC adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel. On television, she portrayed Natasha Rostova in the 2007 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In 2010, she joined Gossip Girl as Eva Coupeau, the French woman with whom Chuck Bass tries to build a new life in Paris. Her longest-running television role was detective Élise Wassermann in The Tunnel, a British-French crime drama adapted from the Scandinavian series The Bridge. Paired with Stephen Dillane’s British detective Karl Roebuck, Wassermann investigates crimes that cross the Channel Tunnel. In Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020), Poésy plays Barbara, a scientist who explains the film’s inverted objects to John David Washington’s Protagonist. This compact scene places her within the film’s time-inversion concept. Alongside acting, she has worked in fashion: she was the face of Chloé perfume campaigns. Her career is notably bilingual and transnational, but its clearest through-line is her repeated movement between French productions and high-profile English-language film and television roles. Her performance as Fleur also links the Potter films’ school-tournament storyline to their wartime finale: Fleur’s wedding at the Burrow is interrupted by news that the Ministry of Magic has fallen. She shares the final films’ wedding sequence with Domhnall Gleeson, who plays Bill Weasley in screen adaptations of Rowling’s novels.