Wrote for, and performed with, the Parisian theater group "Splendid" before initiating her popular screen career in Patrice Leconte's "Les Petits Calins" (1978). Balasko directed her first features, "All Mixed Up", in 1985 and is best known to international audiences as the emotionally satisfying, but physically unattractive, mistress of Gerard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier's "Too Beautiful For You" (1989). Balasko tends to play comic roles which punctures male machismo, and which have wreaked havoc on the popular images of French sexuality. Declining to describe herself as a feminist -- or be