Dujardin garnered international fame and widespread acclaim with his performance of George Valentin in the 2011 award-winning silent movie The Artist by Hazanavicius.

Jean Dujardin was born on 19 June 1972 in the commune of Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine department, Île-de-France region, in the western suburbs of Paris.

[3] Jean Dujardin began his acting career performing a self-written one-man show in various bars and cabarets in Paris.

From 1999 to 2003, Dujardin starred in the France production of the originally Canadian comedy series Un gars, une fille, alongside his future wife Alexandra Lamy, before transitioning to a career in film.

In 2007, directed by Jan Kounen, he starred in the film 99F (99 francs), a very successful existential parody of an advertising exec, adapted from the eponymous best-seller written by Frédéric Beigbeder.

This same year, he ventured in drama for the first time on the silver screen, playing a tortured father and cop in Franck Mancuso's Contre-enquête.

In 2010, he starred alongside Albert Dupontel, playing his character's cancer in The Clink of Ice, a French black comedy written and directed by Bertrand Blier.

[8] French film historian Tim Palmer has analyzed Dujardin's career and rise to success in France, noting how his formative roles were often unredeemable buffoons, very skillful portrayals of childlike men who aggressively and unabashedly reject the responsibilities and compromises of adult life.

[11] His second film that year was Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, playing alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Matthew McConaughey, and Kyle Chandler, among others.