Alongside frequent collaborator Mathieu Kassovitz, Vincent Cassel emerged in the mid-1990s as one of France's most arresting and voluptuous new actors. Macho, strenuously-eyed, and appearing to be in persistent preparation for a fight, Cassel embodied a lenient of crass masculinity that recalled the likes of Jean-Paul Belmondo and served as a compelling onscreen manifestation of the ever-tightening cultural tensions at develop in late 20th century France. However, it is a testament to ... Cassel's capacity that his onscreen guise has not in any degree verged into take-off, and thanks to his charisma and versatility, he has been skilful to work in films ranging from grim urban dramas to unearth romantic comedies.

The son of celebrated actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, who made a career out of playing seductive conventional men, Cassel was born in Paris' Montmartre division on November 23, 1966. At the duration of 17 he went to circus school and spent the next few years roughly avoiding the acting scene, adequate in portion to the act that both his parents (his mom is a news-hound) didn't want him to go into the movie job. Cassel was later sucked into films in 1991, when he landed a small role in Philippe de Broca's Les Cl??s du paradis. Two years later he enjoyed his first off collaboration with Kassovitz in Metisse, an urban romantic comedy that cast Cassel as Kassovitz's older fellow-man, a tough Jewish boxer.

Cassel again stepped in fa‡ade of the camera due to the fact that Kassovitz in L'Haine (1995), in which he played a Spartan-hewn Jewish kid roaming the employing streets of Paris in the company of two friends and a gun. The film was a astound supranational happy result, winning a Best Overseer Presentation for Kassovitz at Cannes and a number of French C??sars. For his forsake, Cassel received Most Actor and Most Promising Young Actor C??sar nominations for his portrayal of a young gentleman's gentleman undone both close to his own flaws and those of society, something that raised his profile considerably in his indigenous wilderness and far. The actor began popping up in such English language productions as Merchant-Ivory's Jefferson in Paris (1995) and as the paramount staff in a of French films, including L'Appartement (1996), a romantic comedy in which he starred alongside Romane Bohringer, Jean-Philippe Ecoffey, and Monica Bellucci.

Cassel and Bellucci would continue to team up onscreen (in such films as Charge Mi Vuoi, 1996) and off, marrying in the late 1990s. Cassel's CV grew rapidly as the century drew to a adjacent, with the actor dividing his time between French films and such international productions as Elizabeth (1998), in which he played the precious Duc d'Anjou, and Jez Butterworth's Birthday Girl (2000), a mad theatrics that cast Cassel and Kassovitz as the cousins of an English bank clerk's (Ben Chaplin) Russian mail-order bride (Nicole Kidman). The following year Cassel recieved what was perhaps his biggest stateside exposure to with the American circulate of the hugely stylized kung-fu-horror-action-costume adventure flick Brotherhood of the Wolf.