Actress/singer Vanessa Paradis

Vanessa Paradis is a French female entertainer known for her multiple talents. She's sort of like the Mandy Moore of France.

She's best known to Americans as Johnny Depp's live-in girlfriend (they were together for fourteen years beginning in 1998), but she has a substantial career that touches both music and film that many people in These States may not be aware of.

In 1997, when she was not yet fourteen, she released her first record, "Joe le taxi," about a taxicab driver in Paris, and the record became an international sensation - except in America.  She later worked in the U.S. in the 1990s, working with hippie soul brother Lenny Kravitz and singing in English.  Her self-titled English-language album was released in 1992 and it produced hit singles in Europe such as "Sunday Mondays" (which she wrote with Kravitz and Henry Hirsch)  and "Be My Baby" (not the Ronettes song but a tune Kravitz co-wrote with Gerry DeVeaux).  Vanessa Paradis even included a cover of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man." Again, Americans couldn't be bothered.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Ms. Paradis has been heralded as an actress in her own country as well.  She played a suicidal circus performer in the Patrice Leconte film Girl on the Bridge in 1999, and in the 2011 movie Café de Flore, directed by Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée, she played a 1960s single mother of child with Down Syndrome.  It got her an award for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the Genie Awards, Canada's equivalent of the Oscars, in 2012.

Maybe someday Americans will take note of Ms. Paradis's talents.  But don't bet on it.  Why not?  Perhaps you weren't paying attention . . . she's French.