Michael Lonsdale



Michael Lonsdale is a Franco-British film, stage and voice actor, equally at ease in French-speaking and English-speaking roles.

Born in 1931, he grew up in Paris, Guernesey, London and Morocco. He worked for a radio show as a teenager, then studied stage acting, and in the late 1950s began his cinematic career. He would throughout the next six decades work with such directors as Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Luis Bunuel, Costa-Gavras, Steven Spielberg and more. Mainstream audiences mainly know him for his roles in Moonraker (the Affably Evil Hugo Drax), The Name of the Rose (the Evilly Affable abbot) and Munich (the neither affable nor evil Papa).

He was awarded a César (the French analog to the Oscars) in 2010 for his role as a martyred monk in Of Gods and Men. Interestingly, that role involved playing a Saintly Church clergyman, whereas usually, when he plays a man of the cloth, it's a fair guess that we're dealing with a Corrupt Church.