Vincent Cassel

Biography: life and films

Outside France, Vincent Cassel is one of his country's best known actors. He was born in Paris on 23rd November 1966, his real name being Vincent Crochon. The son of the actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, he was naturally inclined to follow in the footsteps of his illustrious father. Having trained in a circus school, he studied drama at the Actors Institute in New York before joining Jean-Louis Barrault's theatre company in Paris. Philippe de Broca gave him his first scren role in Les Clés du paradis (1991) but it was through the self-destructive lead character Vinz in Mathieu Kassovitz's gritty urban drama La Haine (1995) that he found stardom, at home and abroad. This role earned Cassel two César nominations in 1996, for Most Promising Actor and Best Actor. Cassel had previously worked with Kassovitz on an earlier film, Métisse (1993), and the two would achieve even greater success with the gory thriller Les Rivières pourpres (2000).

A physical actor endowed with seemingly limitless reserves of energy and charisma, Cassel was ideally suited for action roles. His penchant for playing impulsive heroes and outsiders is demonstrated by his contributions to such films as Jan Kounen's nihilist thriller Dobermann (1997), Luc Besson's spectacular Joan of Arc (1999) and Christophe Gans's horror extravaganza Le Pacte des loups (2001). Cassel has also shown a flair for playing more introverted, complex characters, something that makes him as attractive to auteur filmmakers as genre film directors. This he demonstrated early in his career in Gilles Mimouni's L'Appartement (1996), the film in which he met his future wife Monica Bellucci. Cassel and Bellucci would appear together in some other films, most notably Gaspar Noé's reverse-narrative thriller Irréversible (2002) and Frédéric Schoendoerffer's action-policier Agents secrets (2004). For his performance in Jacques Audiard's modern film noir Sur mes lèvres (2001) Cassel received his second César nomination.

By the early 2000s, Vincent Cassel had become one of the most internationally recognised French actors of his generation, so it was inevitable that he would try to break into Hollywood. He starred alongside Nicole Kidman and Ben Chaplin in Jez Butterworth's Birthday Girl (2001), in the company of his old friend Mathieu Kassovitz. He then lent his talents to Steven Soderbergh's popular heist movies Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007). Back in France, Cassel widened his repertoire by playing a rampant satyr in Jean-Jacques Annaud's fantasy Sa Majesté Minor (2007). He then met with international acclaim for his portrayal of the notorious gangster Jacques Mesrin in Jean-François Richet's thriller diptych Mesrine: L'Instinct de mort (2008) and Mesrine: L'ennemi public no. 1 (2008), the role that won him his first Best Actor César.

Vincent Cassel's enduring popularity with critics and audiences around the world ensure that he is one of those rare actors who can have his cake and eat it, stretching himself both in mainstream genre hits such as David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (2011) and auteur oddities like Romain Gavras's Notre jour viendra (2010). He has also found success as a voice artist, dubbing Hugh Grant in his films for a French audience and providing voices for animated features such as Shrek (2001) and Lascars (2009).

Filmography

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