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» BIOGRAPHY
I haven't had time to write of proper biography of Vincent yet. So until
then, this short one has been borrowed at the Official Site for Crimson
Rivers.
Alongside frequent collaborator Mathieu Kassovitz, Vincent Cassel emerged in the mid-1990s as one of France's most arresting and exciting new actors. He has worked in films ranging from grim urban dramas to light romantic comedies.
The son of celebrated actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, who made a career out of playing seductive bourgeois men, Cassel was born in Paris' Montmartre district in 1966. At the age of 17 he went to circus school and spent the next few years generally avoiding acting, due in part to the fact that both his parents (his mother is a journalist) didn't want him to go into the movie business. Cassel was eventually lured into films in 1991, when he landed a small role in Philippe de Broca's "Les Clés du Paradis."
Two years later he appeared with Kassovitz in "Métisse," an urban romantic comedy that cast Cassel as Kassovitz's older brother, a tough Jewish boxer. Cassel again stepped in front of the camera for Kassovitz in "La Haine" ("Hate") in which he played a rough-hewn Jewish kid roaming the mean streets of Paris in the company of two friends and a gun. The film was surprise international success, winning a Best Director Award for Kassovitz at Cannes and a number of French Césars. Cassel received Céar nominations for Best Actor and Most Promising Young Actor.
Cassel began popping up in such English language productions as Merchant-Ivory's "Jefferson in Paris" and as the leading man in a number of French films, including "L'Appartement," a romantic comedy in which he starred alongside Romane Bohringer, Jean-Philippe Ecoffey and Monica Bellucci. Cassel and Bellucci would continue to collaborate onscreen (in such films as "Come Mi Vuoi") and off, marrying in the late 1990s.
He also appeared in "Elizabeth" in which he played the mincing Duc d'Anjou and Jez Butterworth's "Birthday Girl," a romantic drama opposite Ben Chaplin and Nicole Kidman. |
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