American movie director Tim Burton and Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard were added to France's cultural honour roll in a star-studded Paris ceremony on Monday.
Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand pinned green and gold medallions on the two, making the Alice in Wonderland and Edward Scissorhands director an officer in France's National Order of Arts and Letters, while the Nine and La Vie en Rose star was made a knight.
Burton, wearing a dark suit and his trademark finger-in-an-electric-socket hairdo, called it "one of the biggest honours I've ever received."
"From the beginning of my career, I always felt a very special place in my heart [for] France," he told the crowd of journalists and fans. "Because whether or not you liked the movies, I always felt that the French were looking for the poetry, looking for the meaning, looking for the things I was trying to do."
Cotillard, dressed in a checkered skirt and blouse in seashell pink silk, thanked Burton, whose 2003 film Big Fish was among her first US movies.
Burton "in a way opened the doors to American cinema to me and has always been my idol," she said in a brief speech.
Burton's girlfriend, Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the short-tempered Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, was on also hand for Monday's event, looking in her quirky black and white striped skirt suit and veiled hat as if she had just walked off the set of a Burton movie.
