Huppert's other films in France include Loulou (1980), La Séparation (1994), 8 Women (2002), Gabrielle (2005), Amour (2012), Things to Come (2016), and Happy End (2017).

Huppert is among international cinema's most prolific actresses with her best known English-language films including Heaven's Gate (1980), The Bedroom Window (1987), I Heart Huckabees (2004), The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2013), Louder Than Bombs (2015), Greta (2018), Frankie (2019), and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022).

[12] In 1968, aged 15, Huppert enrolled at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Versailles [fr], where she won a prize for her acting.

Later that year she acted in A Hunger Artist at National Theatre Daniel Sorano in Paris followed by a run at the Shiraz Arts Festival.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times panned the film writing, "It's not very invigorating to see so much talent squandered on such foolish mixed-up romanticism.

The following year she acted in Yves Boisset's drama The Common Man (1975) which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Her international breakthrough came with her performance in Claude Goretta's La Dentelliere (1977),[15] for which she won a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles.

[16] The following year she won acclaim playing the title role Claude Chabrol's crime drama Violette Nozière (1978) winning the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress.

Throughout the 1980s, Huppert continued to explore enigmatic and emotionally distant characters, most notably in Coup de Torchon (1983) directed by Bertrand Tavernier, adapted from Jim Thompson's pulp novel Pop.

She won acclaim for her role in La Séparation (1994) with David Parkinson of British Film Institute writing, "Her distinctive talent for suppressing suffering is readily evident in Christian Vincent’s excruciating study of her slowly disintegrating relationship with Daniel Auteuil, as Huppert imparts chilling intimacy to a withdrawn hand, an unanswering gaze, a treacherous silence and a careless word in conveying the pain of falling out of love.

Huppert's first collaboration with Austrian director Michael Haneke was in The Piano Teacher (2001), based on the titular novel (Die Klavierspielerin) by Elfriede Jelinek, who was named a Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2004.

David Denby of The New Yorker praised her work in the film, writing: "Much of her best acting is no more than a flicker of consciousness, barely visible around the edges of the mask.

Jonathan Cruiel of The San Francisco Chronicle wrote of her: "Huppert has a reputation for her intense portrayals, and in 8 Women, she steals every scene she's in as the uptight, melodramatic, bespectacled aunt.

Huppert also worked in Italy (with directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Mauro Bolognini, Marco Ferreri and Marco Bellocchio), in Russia (with Igor Minaiev), in Central Europe (with Werner Schroeter, Andrzej Wajda, Ursula Meier, Michael Haneke, Márta Mészáros and Aleksandar Petrović) and in Asia (with Hong Sang-soo, Brillante Mendoza and Rithy Panh).

[25] Later that year, she toured the United States in a Royal Court Theatre production of Sarah Kane's theatrical piece 4.48 Psychosis.

[27] In 2009 she also starred in the film White Material; Sura Wood of The Associated Press declared that its director, Claire Denis, was "helped immeasurably by an astringent, fully committed performance from her leading lady, a gaunt, impossibly resolute Isabelle Huppert".

As president in 2009, she and her jury awarded the Palme d'Or to The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke,[30] her director on The Piano Teacher and Time of the Wolf.

[31] In 2010, Huppert starred in the 11th-season finale of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and was cast in the film Captive by Filipino director Brillante Mendoza.

Nick James of The British Film Institute wrote, "Isabelle Huppert gives one of the most riveting performances of her career...refusing to play the victim in a challenging, twisty thriller that seeks to subvert the expectations of the traditional revenge drama".

[40] Katie Baker of The Daily Beast wrote, "Huppert inhabits Phaedra—or Phèdre, for the play is in French with subtitles—for the full 3½ hours with such magnetic force that whatever faults the show has pale next to her raw vitality.

[43] Marilyn Stasio of Variety, "In the end, this turns out to be an upsetting play rather than an engaging one, and if it weren’t for Huppert’s mesmerizing performance, it might send you out of the theater and screaming into the night.

In 2024, she starred in her third collaboration with Hong Sang-soo in A Traveler's Needs that competed at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize.

[56] She is one of only four women who have twice won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival: in 1978 for her role in Violette Nozière by Claude Chabrol (tied with Jill Clayburgh) and in 2001 for The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke.

[59] Huppert was twice voted Best Actress at the European Film Awards: in 2001 for playing Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, and in 2002 with the entire cast of 8 Women (directed by François Ozon).

[2] The Prize organization stated:From her beginnings as a stage actress, Isabelle Huppert has moved between cinema and theatre with an extraordinary productivity, and with results which have made her perhaps the most garlanded performer in the two spheres.

Her name, directly linked with French and European auteur cinema, is a guarantee of quality for the productions in which she takes part: she is an artist who chooses her scripts, her roles and the directors with whom she works with the greatest care, always able to make her mark on the films in which she appears.

Isabelle Huppert, a world icon in contemporary cinema, has never abandoned the theatre, an art which she continues to practise with passion, deep interest and admirable playing skills.

[70][71][72][73] David Thomson on Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary: "[Huppert] has to rate as one of the most accomplished actresses in the world today, even if she seems short of the passion or agony of her contemporary, Isabelle Adjani."

Stuart Jeffries of The Observer on The Piano Teacher: "This is surely one of the greatest performances of Huppert's already illustrious acting career, though it is one that is very hard to watch."

"[75] Huppert's work in Elle and Things to Come topped The Playlist's ranking of "The 25 Best Performances Of 2016", stating: "She runs the emotional gamut from one film to the next, carnal, savage, shattered, listless, invulnerable but exposed, a woman on the verge of collapse who refuses to succumb to her instabilities.