Benoît Magimel

Biography: life and films

An enfant prodige of French cinema during its auteur renaissance in the 1990s, Benoît Magimel has enjoyed the kind of busy screen career that most actors can only dream of. Having proved his versatility at an early age in a wide range of roles, Magimel soon became a magnet for not only experienced filmmakers but also a new generation of dynamic up-and-coming directors. It's hard to believe but the youthful forty year old already has seventy screen credits to his name and is as popular as ever, both with audiences and film directors. Barely halfway through his career, Magimel has already made his mark on French cinema, and looks set to go on doing so for many years to come.

Benoît Magimel was born in Paris, France, on 11th May 1974. His mother was a nurse, his father a bank employee. He was only 12 when he landed his first screen role - in Étienne Chatiliez's La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille (1988), a film that was a massive hit at the French box office, attracting an audience of over 4 million. Four years later, Magimel took the decision to abandon his studies and try to make a career as an actor. After small parts in films such as Philippe Leriche's Les Années campagne (1992), Michel Devill's Toutes peines confondues (1992) and Benoît Jacquot's La Fille seule (1995), he made a fleeting appearance in one of the most talked about French films of the decade, Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995). He then had his first big break, playing alongside Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil in André Téchiné's Les Voleurs (1996). His performance in this film won him the Prix Michel-Simon in 1997.

By now, Benoît Magimel had no difficulty attracting offers of work from many established and debutant filmmakers, who cast him in a wide variety of roles that allowed him to demonstrate his range and versatility. In 1998, he played two characters at the extreme ends of the social spectrum, a rich idler in Olivier Dahan's Déjà mort and a Polish immigrant in Une minute de silence. Diane Kurys then cast him as Alfred de Musset in Les Enfants du siècle (1999), in which Juliette Binoche starred as George Sand. Magimel and Binoche fell in love during the making of this film and soon had a daughter Hannah, before separating in 2003. In his next film, Magimel starred opposite another French acting legend, Isabelle Huppert, in Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (2000), the film that won him the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. Now that he had found his way into France's élite acting fraternity, it seems fitting that Magimel should then be cast as the Sun King Louis XIV in Gérard Corbiau's Le Roi danse (2000).

Magimel received further acclaim for his performance in Xavier Beauvois's Selon Matthieu (2000), where he partnered Nathalie Baye, before proving himself in an altogether different kind of film, Florent Emilio-Siri's feisty action-thriller Nid de guêpes (2002). With La Fleur du mal (2003), again appearing with Baye, Magimel began his fruitful association with one of the directing legends of French cinema, Claude Chabrol. La Demoiselle d'honneur (2004) and La Fille coupée en deux (2007) completed the impressive trio of films that the actor made with Chabrol. After lending his talents to such sober dramas as these, Magimel was back playing the action hero in Kassovitz's Les Rivières pourpres 2 (2004) and Gérard Pirès's Les Chevaliers du ciel (2005), before taking on his darkest and most unsettling role to date, as a hired killer in Frédéric Schoendoerffer's Truands (2007). Prior to this, he had turned down the role of the gangster Jacques Mesrine when it was offered to him by Barbet Schroeder (the part went to Vincent Cassel) .

Never one to rest on his laurels, the actor then ventured into lighter territory in Marc Esposito's comedy Mon pote (2010), buddying up with Edouard Baer. Since Magimel is at his most convincing when cast as the vulnerable outsider, he had a made-to-measure role in Jalil Lespert's Des vents contraires (2011), playing a man coming to terms with the sudden unexplained disappearance of his wife. In his next film, Florent Emilio Siri's biopic on the singer Claude François, Cloclo (2012), the actor is virtually unrecognisable as the impresario Paul Lederman. For his sympathetic portrayal in Emmanuelle Bercot's La Tête haute (2016), Magimel received the Best Supporting Actor César in 2016. Just a few days after he was handed the award, in March 2016, he was taken into police custody after knocking down a 62 year old woman in the street, whilst driving a hired car without a licence. The media had a field day when it was revealed that the actor had tested positive for cocaine. Despite this bad publicity, Magimel remains one of French cinema's leading lights, and he is one of the very few A-list French actors to have had the opportunity and inclination to divide his time between low budget auteur films and commercial blockbusters.

Filmography

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