Trivia: One of the most prolific French actors of the 1980s and '90s, François Cluzet possesses an enviable versatility that makes him equally adept at both high comedy and straight drama. Cluzet, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dustin Hoffman, began his screen career acting in the films of Diane Kurys. He became established over the years as one of his country's most dependable actors, as likely to play a bumbling petty criminal as a member of the May 1968 generation struggling with bourgeois ennui and moral dilemma.Born in Paris on September 21, 1955, Cluzet was first inspired to become an actor as a child, when his father would take him and his brother on weekly outings to the theatre and music hall. He quit school at the age of 17 to study drama with Jean Périmony. In 1976, he made his theatrical debut and spent the next few years working steadily on the stage. Cluzet began his film career in 1980 with a role in Diane Kurys' Cocktail Molotov, a drama set during the May 1968 protests which cast him as the best friend of one of the film's protagonists. That same year, he had a supporting part in Le Cheval d'Orgueil, the first of many films he would make with Claude Chabrol, and also broke into television. The latter medium would be one that Cluzet would return to constantly even as his film career took flight.1983 proved to be a breakthrough year for the actor, who earned two César nominations, one for his work in L'Été Meurtrier, a drama that cast him as the brother of a man in love with an unstable woman (Isabelle Adjani), and the other for his leading portrayal of a young Parisian reflecting on his Communist/anarchic upbringing in Vive la sociale! That same year, Cluzet again collaborated with Kurys in Coup de Foudre, a WWII marriage drama starring Isabelle Huppert and Miou-Miou as dissatisfied wives.In 1986, Cluzet starred in one of the most celebrated films of his career, 'Round Midnight. Bertrand Tavernier's story of a self-destructive American jazz musician (Dexter Gordon) who is befriended by a young Frenchman (Cluzet), it allowed the actor to carry a film (in tandem with the excellent Gordon) rather than merely support it. Cluzet subsequently stuck with dramas, doing strong work as ineffectual husbands in both Claire Denis's Chocolat and Claude Chabrol's Une Affaire de Femmes (both 1988), the latter of which saw him re-team with Coup de Foudre co-star Huppert. Indeed, during the early 1990s, much of the actor's energies seemed to be directed toward playing troubled husbands, as demonstrated by additional turns in Agneiszka Holland's Olivier, Olivier (1992) and Claude Chabrol's L'Enfer (1994).Cluzet has also been repeatedly cast as struggling authors in a number of films, his slightly tortured intellectual looks lending themselves well to such a profession. He did particularly notable work in this capacity in Les Apprentis (1995), in which he and Guillaume Depardieu co-starred as two losers struggling to pay the rent in Paris; Olivier Assayas' Fin août, début septembre (1998), an ensemble drama in which he played a terminally ill writer; and Dolce Far Niente (2000), which cast him as a young author dallying around the Italian countryside.

Trivia: As the only child of a stylist father and a mother who produced runway exhibitions, French actor Gaspard Ulliel came of age in the shadow of the Parisian fashion world. Ulliel undertook an early foray into drama, when an adult friend of the family sought to establish an agency for child actors and -- impressed by Ulliel's visage and natural ability -- asked the then 11-year-old actor to join. Ulliel instantly agreed, and debuted with roles in numerous French telemovies.Ulliel's first taste of international exposure arrived in 2001, when the 17-year-old actor appeared as Louis in Christophe Gans and Pascal Laugier's fantasy and martial arts epic Brotherhood of the Wolf (aka La Pacte des Loups). Derived from a legendary series of events in French history, the picture weaves the tale of a strange, rhinoceros-like beast that prowls the countryside and devours hundreds of victims, but is countered by a team of local warriors. Although the role of Louis was a relatively small part, Ulliel's work caught the eye of the brilliant French director André Téchiné, who cast the teenager opposite the luminous French actress Emmanuelle Béart in his WWII drama Strayed (aka Les Égarés, 2003). As Yves, a rough-hewn, working-class Frenchman who helps lead Béart's widow and her children to safety in an isolated, rural cabin (and subsequently conducts an affair with Béart), Ulliel impressed everyone with his haunting presence. As one journalist observed, this role finally "made critics take notice."Ulliel continued his history of pairing up with French screen goddesses when director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (of Delicatessen and Amélie fame) enlisted him as the missing soldier lover and fiancé of Audrey Tautou's Mathilde in the 2004 wartime romance A Very Long Engagement (aka Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles). The picture swept away the hearts of critics and the public when it premiered in late 2004 and received two Academy Award nominations. And although Ulliel's character is, by the very nature of the story, offscreen for much of the film, he made an enduring impression and continued his career ascent.Ulliel received premier onscreen billing for the first occasion in 2005, as Simon, a young man en route to spend Christmas with his über-dysfunctional French family, in Rodolphe Marconi's disturbingly intimate drama The Last Day (aka La Dernier Jour). That same year, Ulliel joined the massive ensemble cast of Richard Dembo's La Maison de Nina, and shot "Marais," Gus Van Sant's contribution to the film-a-sketch Paris, Je t'Aime (2007), while gearing up for his American debut.That debut (a natural for Ulliel, who speaks fluent English) arrived in the form of Peter Webber's 2007 horror picture Hannibal Rising -- the Dino de Laurentiis Company's fifth installment in the ongoing series of films about Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, the psychopathic madman who devours his victims. In the film, Ulliel plays Lecter at a young age. The story finds him watching helplessly, and driven over the edge into insane fury, as his family is slaughtered by a bunch of crazed soldiers; he then ultimately enrolls in medical school to learn how to extract brutal anatomical revenge on the war criminals responsible for extinguishing his clan. He went on to appear in The Third Part of the World, Inside Ring, The Vintner's Luck and The Princess of Montpensier.