[1] Her acting career began in 1983, when she starred in the Maurice Pialat film À Nos Amours at age 16, as a girl from Paris beginning her sexual awakening.

Her international breakthrough came in 1985 with her portrayal of the main character, a vagrant who fails both physically and morally, in Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), directed by Agnès Varda.

In 1995, Bonnaire starred as an apparently simple maid in Claude Chabrol's widely acclaimed thriller La Cérémonie.

In 2004, Bonnaire starred in another Leconte film, Intimate Strangers, which was an arthouse box-office hit in the United States.

[6] Bonnaire has a daughter from a relationship with actor William Hurt, whom she met in 1991 during filming of the Albert Camus novel The Plague (La Peste).