Focus Features

An actress with an inimitable, cool elegance, Charlotte Rampling was born on this day in 1946 in the quaint Essex village of Sturmer, the daughter of a painter and an Olympic gold medalist-turned-British army officer. Rampling was raised between Britain and France, educated at the Jeanne d'Arc Académie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles and St. Hilda's School, just outside of London, and as a result has enjoyed a career as an multilingual actress working in mainland Europe as well as in Britain and the US. She had her breakthrough playing the eponymous heroine’s catty roommate in Georgy Girl (1966), and over the next decade acted in a remarkably diverse range of projects including the British TV show The Avengers, the Roger Corman movie Target: Harry, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, the historical drama Henry VIII and His Six Wives (playing Anne Boleyn), the infamous psychosexual drama The Night Porter, sci-fi fantasy Zardoz, and an updated take on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. The 80s were marked by both prestigious roles (in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict) as well as infamously oddball ones, such as in Nagisa Oshima’s Max, Mon Amour, a movie in which she falls in love with a monkey. However, after a couple of decades on the fringes, Rampling has had a massive career resurgence in recent years, not least because of her collaborations with French enfant terrible François Ozon, who guided the actress to three of her finest performances in Under the Sand (2000), Swimming Pool (2003) and Heading South (2005). Indeed, it seems Rampling simply gets better with age.

An actress with an inimitable, cool elegance, Charlotte Rampling was born on this day in 1946 in the quaint Essex village of Sturmer, the daughter of a painter and an Olympic gold medalist-turned-British army officer. Rampling was raised between Britain and France, educated at the Jeanne d'Arc Académie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles and St. Hilda's School, just outside of London, and as a result has enjoyed a career as an multilingual actress working in mainland Europe as well as in Britain and the US. She had her breakthrough playing the eponymous heroine’s catty roommate in Georgy Girl (1966), and over the next decade acted in a remarkably diverse range of projects including the British TV show The Avengers, the Roger Corman movie Target: Harry, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, the historical drama Henry VIII and His Six Wives (playing Anne Boleyn), the infamous psychosexual drama The Night Porter, sci-fi fantasy Zardoz, and an updated take on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. The 80s were marked by both prestigious roles (in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict) as well as infamously oddball ones, such as in Nagisa Oshima’s Max, Mon Amour, a movie in which she falls in love with a monkey. However, after a couple of decades on the fringes, Rampling has had a massive career resurgence in recent years, not least because of her collaborations with French enfant terrible François Ozon, who guided the actress to three of her finest performances in Under the Sand (2000), Swimming Pool (2003) and Heading South (2005). Indeed, it seems Rampling simply gets better with age.