Charles Berling

Biography: life and films

Charles Berling, one of France's busiest and most popular actors of stage and screen, was born in Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, France, on 30th April 1958. The fourth of six children, his father was a navy doctor and his mother an English teacher. He discovered his passion for acting at school, so, having passed his baccalaureate, he went off to Brussels to study drama at the Institut Supérieur des Arts, before joining the Compagnie des Mirabelles and the National Theatre of Strasbourg, under the direction of Jean-Louis Martinelli. For the first decade of his acting career, from the early 1980s, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the theatre.

Berling's screen career began with a small role in Marc Lobet's crime drama Meurtres à domicile (1982). Towards the end of the decade, he began appearing in television series and movies. His screen career began to take off after he appeared in Pascale Ferran's debut film Petits arrangements avec les morts (1994), in a role that earned him his first César nomination, for Most Promising Actor. The following year, he played Jules in a television remake of Jules et Jim directed by Jeanne Labrune and had a notable supporting role in Claude Sautet's Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud. It was Patrice Leconte who gave Berling his first major screen role in the lavish period comedy Ridicule (1996), for which he received another César nomination, for Best Actor.

Berling then picked up two further Best Actor César nominations for what must surely rate as his finest screen performances to date, in Anne Fontaine's Nettoyage à sec (1997) and Cédric Kahn's L'Ennui (1998), in which the actor is at his best as a sexually repressed neurotic. He made an admirable Pierre Curie in Claude Pinoteau's Les Palmes de Monsieur Schutz (1997) and his comedic talents were put to good use by Frédéric Jardin in Cravate club (2002). Other notable performances are to be found in Patrice Chéreau's Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (1998), Olivier Assayas's Les Destinées sentimentales (2000), Frédéric Schoendoerffer's Scènes de crimes (2000) and Anne Fontaine's Comment j'ai tué mon père (2001).

An actor of immense charm and versatility, Charles Berling is happy to divide his time between mainstream cinema and films d'auteur, lending his talents to established directors and promising newcomers. He has worked with filmmakers as diverse as Michel Deville (Un fil à la patte), Raoul Ruiz (Comédie de l'innocence), Jean-Pierre Mocky (Grabuge), Zabou Breitman (L'Homme de sa vie), Safy Nebbou (Comme un homme) and Paul Verhoeven (Elle). Meanwhile, in parallel with his busy career on the small and big screen, he has been active in the theatre since the early 1980s, and currently manages the Théâtre Liberté in Toulon with his brother Philippe Berling, a successful theatre director. He has also started a career as a singer, releasing an album entitled Jeune Chanteur in 2012.

Charles Berling has also written a book, based on his mother's life, Aujourd'hui, maman est morte, published in 2011. In 2015, he began working on a screen adaptation of this book, having already directed a television documentary Sur les traces de Gustave Eiffel (2009). His son Émile Berling (born in 1990) has embarked on a successful career as an actor, having made his screen debut alongside his father in Olivier Assayas's L'Heure d'été (2008).

Filmography

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