This Wednesday, May 11, Benoit Magimel is 48 years old. And the actor has been part of the French landscape for a long time. Revealed by Étienne Chatiliez’s cult film, Life is a long calm river, in 1988, the young actor was then 14 years old. But his piercing blue eyes, his contagious smile and his mysterious side marked. And he never left this world which then adopted him. Such charisma that director Xavier Beauvois even compared him to Delon a few years ago. “He has an old class, I would see him in a film alongside Gabin, Blier.“, he then declared about him. Unclassifiable therefore.
Behind this mysterious side, Benoît Magimel hides a “slight complex“. As recalled in a portrait of Releasethis Parisian middle-class child, born of a nurse mother and a bank employee father, does not have the baccalaureate, nor the slightest diploma, having only shone little during his studies. And left school at the age of 16. And that’s by responding to an ad in Freed that he lands his first role in the essential Life is a long quiet river. Her role as “Momo Currant” allows her to become the darling of mothers and the crush large numbers of teenage girls. And over the years, the now 48-year-old actor has given us plenty of looks.
Long hair, mustache, 20 kilos less…
At the time, the teenager displays an iroquois crestwhen he was a percussionist in a band, before opting for a wiser look, and a few years later opting for a mustache. As much on the screen, by chaining always totally different roles, in life, he is also a real chameleon. So at 24, he bursts the screen again in Already deaddrama by Olivier Dahan, completely inhabited by the character, he appears with long hair, visible dark circles and sunken cheeks. A simple guy who seems to adapt to all walks of life. And whose talent means that the actor has never left French cinema, which has recently honored him, on the occasion of the César 2022.
During the Césars, the precocious child of French cinema was distinguished for his performance in the film by Emmanuelle Bercot In his lifetime. For his new character, again, he changed his appearance by following a draconian diet to lose a lot of weight : “I was on a diet, deprived of a canteen. I must have lost sixty pounds in a year… […] On the third diet, I couldn’t lose anymore so I had my dentist remove my pivot teeth to make my face look more sunken.“During all these years, the 14-year-old kid has obviously changed a lot, but childhood seems to have never left his smile so frank.