SMALL MINDS TALL ACTRESS GETS THAT SHRINKING FEELING.

Byline: - Bob Strauss

Marion Cotillard is as lithe and lovely as you would expect a rising French movie star to be.

So how does she convince so thoroughly as Edith Piaf, the tiny, unconventional-looking singing sensation whose shortened, problem-plagued life is recounted in "La Vie En Rose"?

"There's a technical approach," acknowledges the Paris-born Cotillard, who graced such Hollywood productions as "Big Fish" and "A Good Year" before the Piaf film became a huge hit in Europe. "I didn't know much about her life before, so I did a lot of reading, watched movies she made, her interviews, intimate footage. All I could watch was interesting to me. And I listened to her a lot, of course. But then, with all this, my aim was to understand her, not imitate."

Embodying Piaf's highly emotional spirit was a thrilling acting exercise, Cotillard reports. Approximating Piaf's distinctive and well-known appearance was a little more stressful. Fairly simple makeup and hair tricks worked for the younger, high-foreheaded Edith. But the chanteuse's declining years -- when she died at 47, years of illness and drug abuse had arguably left her looking twice her actual age -- required hours upon hours of prosthetic applications each morning.

The most amazing part of Cotillard's physical transformation, though, is how the 5-foot-7-inch actress somehow shrank herself down to 4-foot-8-inch Edith.

"I did a lot of scenes without shoes," she admits. "And the other actors had lifts in theirs. But more abstractly, I remembered that some skinny Asian people have the ability to imagine that they're so heavy, you can't lift them. It's a mind trick, and that's what I did. I just felt so strongly that I was petite, I was sure it would register on screen.

"Maybe it's stupid. But it was my ritual each morning. 'I'm so small, I'm so small ...' "

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Marion Cotillard in "LA VIE EN ROSE," opening June 8.