Vincent Cassel, 44, and Mathieu Amalric, 45, lead the way, godfathers to a generation of French actors. Both have broken out internationally, Cassel in the Ocean’s series with George Clooney and recently in Black Swan. Prolific actor Amalric, who also won best director at Cannes in 2010 for Tournee, featured as Bond villain Dominic Greene in Quantum of Solace.
In the same age group as Duris is Guillaume Canet, 38, who starred opposite Leonardo di Caprio in The Beach and is now achieving bigger success as a director, with hits such as the thriller Tell No One and Little White Lies, featuring his partner, Marion Cotillard.
A fast-rising French star is former TV comedian Jean Dujardin, 39, who won best actor at Cannes earlier this year for his role in The Artist, a silent movie sure to bring him international recognition. He showed a more serious side, briefly, in Canet’s Little White Lies.
Photo: AFP
Striking, tall Gaspard Ulliel, 26, has built a strong career, including key roles in A Very Long Engagement and Bertrand Tavernier’s current release The Princess of Montpensier, although he’s most famous for playing a young Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising.
Louis Garrel, 28, is a softer lead, cornering romantic, tortured roles after his breakthrough as Eva Green’s brother in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers.
Melvil Poupaud, 38, has starred in a great number of films for directors including Raoul Ruiz, Erich Rohmer and James Ivory, and he collaborated with Francois Ozon in Time to Leave and Le Refuge.
Photo: EPA
Gilles Lelouche, 39, is the current French man of action, featuring in current hit Point Blank.
Tahar Rahim, 30, broke through as the prisoner Malik in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and has starred in British film The Eagle.
Photo: EPA
Photo: AFP
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless