Nobel was born in Rouen in the department of Seine-Maritime. Her father, Guy Bonneau, died when she was 12, after which her mother remarried Bernard Loisel, a pharmacist. At 14 she began formal dramatic training at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Rouen, and later relocated to Paris at 17 to study at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Paris. She adopted stage names in sequence, first Jackie Nobel, then Chantal Nobel.
She made her stage debut in 1968 with the popular comedy Boeing Boeing by Marc Camoletti. Her film debut came the same year in La Main noire, directed by Max Pécas. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s she built a steady presence in French cinema: La Honte de la famille (1969), La Grande Maffia… (1971), L'Odeur des fauves (1972), Le Permis de conduire (1974), Opération Lady Marlène (1975), L'Année sainte (1976), Te marre pas… c'est pour rire! (1982), Flics de choc (1983), and Les parents ne sont pas simples cette année (1984).
Her television career began with a role in the miniseries Aurore et Victorien (1974–75), followed by a leading role across 14 episodes of La lumière des justes (1979), in which she played Sophie de Champlitte across multiple life stages in a 19th-century Russian setting. She appeared in 13 episodes of Salut champion (1981). Her breakthrough came with the lead female role of Florence Berg in Châteauvallon (1985), a 26-episode prime-time feuilleton billed as the "French Dallas" and centred on the rivalries of a wealthy press dynasty. The series was one of the most expensive French television productions of its era.
In early 1985, before the automobile accident that ended her public life, Nobel participated in the 7th Paris-Alger-Dakar Rally as co-pilot in the trucks category. She formed a three-person crew with driver Georges Groine and mechanic Bernard Malfériol, competing aboard a Mercedes-Benz 1936 AK truck carrying race number 620. The team completed the arduous event and secured fifth place in the trucks classification. Nobel was noted as the only woman to finish in the classified results among the truck entries, a distinction she highlighted in television interviews. Her preparation included training to assemble and dismantle truck wheels.
On the night of 27–28 April 1985, at approximately 3:20 a.m., Nobel was seriously injured in a car accident at the hamlet of Maltaverne, near Tracy-sur-Loire in the Nièvre department, along the RN 7. She had been a passenger in a Porsche 924 driven by singer Sacha Distel following a recording of the television programme Champs-Élysées hosted by Michel Drucker. The vehicle left the road in a long curve, lost its right tyres, spun, and crashed into a pylon. Nobel required extrication by firefighters using pneumatic shears. She sustained multiple pelvic fractures and other severe injuries, entering a coma that lasted between three weeks and forty days by various accounts. She was treated at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Medical evaluation later placed her permanent partial incapacity at 80%, including lasting orthopedic and neurological sequelae including impaired use of her right leg.
The accident halted production of Châteauvallon, which had been airing its first and only season at the time. Jean Claude Héberlé, president of Antenne 2, confirmed there would be no second series given Nobel's condition.
Nobel filed a complaint against Sacha Distel. In 1988 he was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison with suspension for involuntary injuries. During her hospitalisation in 1985, three photographers intruded into her hospital room to photograph her. The resulting Paris Court of Appeal ruling of 17 March 1986 extended the legal notion of domicile to include the patient's hospital room, establishing what became known in French privacy law as the "jurisprudence Chantal Nobel."
Nobel withdrew permanently from acting and relocated to Ramatuelle in the South of France with her husband, jeweller Jean-Louis Julian, whom she had married in a private ceremony shortly after the accident while still using a wheelchair. Her daughter Anne-Charlotte was born in October 1980 with Julian; her elder daughter Alexandra, born in September 1971, was from a previous relationship with producer Jacques-Henri Marin. A rare television appearance on Studio Gabriel with Michel Drucker in April 1996 did not result in a return to acting. Julian died in 2024; his funeral was held on 23 May 2024 in Saint-Tropez. Nobel died in Ramatuelle on 30 April 2026, at the age of 77.