Éric Elmosnino

Origins and early life

Éric Elmosnino was born at Suresnes, west of Paris, on 2 May 1964, and grew up in the western suburbs, the son of a Moroccan Jewish father who worked as an industrial draughtsman at Thomson-CSF and of an Alsatian mother who left the state electricity company to raise her children.

Work and career

He trained at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique and spent twenty years chiefly on the stage, much of it with the director Jean-Michel Ribes and in the company of the Théâtre national de la Colline, before the cinema found him. In 2010 Joann Sfar cast him as Serge Gainsbourg in Gainsbourg, vie héroïque, the portrait of another French Jewish child of immigrants who had worn the yellow star as a boy in occupied Paris; Elmosnino did not imitate him so much as inhabit the stoop and the voice, and the film opens on the child hearing what the country then said about Jews.

He won the César for best actor in 2011 for the part, together with the Prix Lumière. He has worked steadily since, in Le Skylab, La Famille Bélier and Les Choses humaines, and continues to alternate between the theatre and the screen.