| Charlotte Rampling | |
|---|---|
 Rampling at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival | |
| Born | Tessa Charlotte Rampling (1946-02-05) 5 February 1946 Sturmer, Essex, England, UK |
| Years active | 1965–present |
| Spouse(s) | Bryan Southcombe (1972–1976) Jean Michel Jarre (1978–1998) |
Charlotte Rampling, OBE (born Tessa Charlotte Rampling; 5 February 1946) is an English actress. Her career spans four decades in English language as well as French and Italian cinema.
Early life
Rampling was born in Sturmer, Essex, the daughter of Isabel Anne (née Gurteen), a painter, and Godfrey Rampling, an Olympic gold medalist and army officer. She attended Jeanne d'Arc Académie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles and St. Hilda's School, a boarding school in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England.
Career
After beginning her career at age 17 in a commercial role and as a model, Rampling's first screen appearance was uncredited as a water skier in Richard Lester's film The Knack ...and How to Get It in 1965. She next played the role of Meredith in the film Georgy Girl (1966).
In 1967 Rampling played the gunfighter Hana Wilde in "The Superlative Seven", an episode of The Avengers. After this, her acting career blossomed in both English and French cinema.
Despite an early flurry of success, she told The Independent, "We weren't happy. It was a nightmare, breaking the rules and all that. Everyone seemed to be having fun, but they were taking so many drugs they wouldn't know it anyway."
Rampling has performed controversial roles. In 1969, in Luchino Visconti's The Damned (La Caduta degli dei), she played a young wife sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Critics praised her performance, and in the role she portrayed a different image: mysterious, sensitive and ultimately tragic. "The Look" as co-star Dirk Bogarde called it, became her trademark. In The Night Porter (1974) she portrayed a former concentration camp inmate who, after the war, meets a former camp guard with whom she had an ambiguous relationship. Their relationship resumes. Bogarde played the camp guard. In Max mon amour, she played a woman who fell in love with a chimpanzee.
Rampling gained recognition from American audiences in a remake of Raymond Chandler's detective story Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and particularly in The Verdict (1982), an acclaimed drama directed by Sidney Lumet that starred Paul Newman.
Rampling at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.
Rampling credits François Ozon with drawing her back to film in the 2000s, a period when she came to terms with the much earlier death of her eldest sister Sarah. After giving birth prematurely in 1966, she had committed suicide at 23. "I thought that after such a long time of not letting her be with me," she told The Guardian, "I would like to bring her back into my life." The character she played in Ozon's Swimming Pool (2003), Sarah Morton, was named in her sister's honour. For most of Rampling's life, she would say only that her sister had died of a brain haemorrhage; when she and her father heard the news, they agreed they would never let her mother know the truth. They kept their secret until Rampling's mother died in 2001.
At 59, Rampling appeared in Laurent Cantet's Heading South (Vers le Sud), a 2005 film about sexual tourism. She plays Ellen, a single English woman who is a professor of French literature. She holidays in 1970s Haiti to get the sexual attention she does not get at home.
On her choice of roles, Rampling says,
"I generally don't make films to entertain people. I choose the parts that challenge me to break through my own barriers. A need to devour, punish, humiliate or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it's certainly a big part of sex. To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness."[citation needed]
The actress has continued to work in sexually provocative films such as Swimming Pool and Basic Instinct 2. More recently, she portrayed the mother of Keira Knightley's character in the title role in The Duchess (2008).
In 2002, she recorded an album entitled Comme Une Femme. It is in both French and English, and includes parts that are spoken word as well as tracks Rampling sang.[citation needed]
Given her striking style and look, Rampling has also been featured on the covers of Vogue Magazine, Interview Magazine, Elle Magazine and CRUSHfanzine.
In 2010, she completed filming Cleanskin, a terrorist thriller starring Sean Bean, James Fox, Tuppence Middleton, Michelle Ryan and Abhin Galeya.[citation needed] The film was written, produced and directed by Hadi Hajaig.[citation needed]
She is currently appearing in the present (eighth) season of Dexter as a neuropsychiatrist specializing in serial killers.
Personal life
One of the most traumatic events in Rampling's life occurred in 1966, when she was 20 years old. Her elder sister Sarah killed herself after giving birth prematurely and losing her child. Rampling was devastated by this loss, which she experienced as an abandonment by her sister. She and her father lied to her mother, telling her that Sarah had died of a stroke. Rampling seemingly overcame this trauma and was able to continue acting. Many years later she made a film in which her character was named Sarah (see above).
In 1972, Rampling married the actor and publicist Bryan Southcombe. They were widely reported to be living in a ménage à trois with a male model, Randall Laurence. They had a son Barnaby Southcombe before porcing in 1976. (He has become a successful television director.)
In 1974, Rampling was quoted by the syndicated columnist Earl Wilson as saying: "There are so many misunderstandings in life. I once caused a scandal by saying I lived with two men [...] I didn't mean it in a sexual sense [...] We were just like any people sharing a flat."
In 1978, Rampling married the French composer Jean Michel Jarre and had a second son, David Jarre, with him. He is a magician. She also brought up stepdaughter Émilie Jarre, now a fashion designer.
The marriage was publicly dissolved in 1997 when she learned from tabloid newspaper stories about Jarre's affairs with other women. She had a nervous breakdown.
She has been engaged to Jean-Noël Tassez, a French communications tycoon, since 1998. On 6 April 2009, The Daily Mail reported that Rampling had hired lawyers to try to block the publication of a biography about her written by a close friend.
In March 2013, Rampling was listed by The Guardian as one of its "fifty best-dressed over 50s."
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