Charlotte Rampling (born February 5, 1946) is an acclaimed English actress.
Her career spans four decades and delves into French and Italian cinema.
After beginning her career at age seventeen 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, which was followed a year later by the role of Meredith in the film Georgy Girl.
After this, her acting career blossomed in both English and French cinema.
Young Rampling was sexy in a lithe, boyish way favoured by the times.
Rampling has often performed controversial roles.
In 1969, in Luchino Visconti's The Damned (La Caduta degli dei), she played a young wife sent to a concentration camp.
This role redrew Rampling entirely as mysterious, tragic, even sinister. "The Look" as co-star Dirk Bogarde called it, became her trademark.
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, and had one child, Barnaby Southcombe (now a successful television director) before divorcing in 1976.
In 1974's The Night Porter she portrayed a former concentration camp inmate entangled in a sado-masochistic relationship with her former guard, played by Bogarde.
In 1978, Rampling married the French composer Jean Michel Jarre and had a son, magician David Jarre.
The marriage was publicly dissolved in 1997 when she found out via tabloid newspaper stories about Jarre's affairs with other women and had a nervous breakdown.
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