While still dancing, she was picked by Robert Hossein to play Esmeralda in a 1980 theatrical production of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame[6] and around this time started to use the name Anne Fontaine.

Fontaine's first project as solo director, Les Histoires d'amour finissent mal... en général (Love Affairs Usually End Badly), won the 1993 Prix Jean Vigo.

It won the Best Screenplay award at the 1997 Venice Film Festival and is generally considered a milestone on Fontaine's way to becoming "an important figure in contemporary French cinema".

"[9] While knowing that the movement of "women's cinema" worked as a counter to the classical Hollywood system, Fontaine didn't like to identify with this.

During an interview in 1998 with Eve-Laure Moros, she stated: "If people say that 'Nettoyage a sec' is a woman's film, I'm very surprised, I don't know what that means...