Mathieu Amalric

Origins and early life

Mathieu Amalric was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 25 October 1965 to two journalists of Le Monde: his mother Nicole Zand, the paper's literary critic, was born in Poland to a Jewish family, and his father Jacques Amalric was its foreign editor and later editor-in-chief of Libération. He spent part of his childhood abroad on his parents' postings and drifted into cinema from the technical side, as an assistant and script supervisor, before Arnaud Desplechin cast him and gave him a face the French cinema of the following thirty years could not do without.

Work and career

He won the César for most promising actor for Comment je me suis disputé in 1996, then the César for best actor twice, for Rois et reine in 2004 and for Le Scaphandre et le papillon in 2007, in which he played the paralysed Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby almost entirely with one eye. English-speaking audiences know him as Dominic Greene, the villain of the James Bond film Quantum of Solace in 2008, and he has worked with Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg and the Coen brothers.

As a director he won the prize for best direction at Cannes for Tournée in 2010, and has since made Barbara and Serre moi fort. He has spoken of the Jewish family his mother came from and of the wartime history that reached him through her, and he acted in Belaya Ptitsa, a film about the massacre of Babi Yar.