Audran is, with Jeanne Moreau and Anna Karina, a key actress of the French New Wave, especially in the films of her then husband Claude Chabrol. A woman of elegant beauty, she projected an image of the cool yet sensual bourgeoisie; her talent was to inject emotion and humour into such characters. She is integral to the appeal of Chabrol's bourgeois dramas of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Les Biches (1968), La Femme infidèle (1969) and Le Boucher (1970), and of Luis Buñuel's Le Charme discrèt de la Bourgeoisie (1972). After smaller roles, for instance in Violette Nozière (1978) and Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon / Clean Slate (1981), she revived her international fame in Gabriel Axel's Babettes Gæstebud / Babette's Feast (1987, Denmark). She has meanwhile continued to appear in numerous French films.