Date of Birth:Jan.12,1966
Place of Birth:Paris, France
Martinez was raised in a working class suburb along with his younger brother, Vincent.Olivier Martinez father was a professional boxer-turned-mechanic of Spanish descent hailing from Morocco; his mother, a French secretary. Coming out of his teens, Martinez abandoned school and went to work in jobs that, included jeans salesman and later, bartender.Olivier Martinez began following in his father's footsteps, boxing as a professional welterweight, but put down the gloves after a car accident left his back injured. In 1989, at the age of 23, a casting director saw him bartending and helped him enroll in the Conservatoire National Superieur d'Art Dramatique, and the world of acting opened Martinez to new ways of examining life.
With spots on French television in as early as 1990, it was not long before Martinez was demonstrating the wealth of his talents on the big screen. Cast as a young criminal sharing time with screen legend Yves Montand in Jean-Jacques Beineix's "IP5: L'île aux pachyderms" ("The Island of Pachyderms") (1992), Martinez was nominated in 1993 for France's top acting honor, the Cesar, for Most Promising Actor. Olivier Martinez soon delivered on that promise swiftly and effectively, jumping into the drama "Un, deux, tres, soleil" ("1, 2, 3, Sun") (1993) as the charming local thief, Paul. In 1994, finding himself again in the same place at the Cesar Awards, he left this time with award in hand.
Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau knew he wanted Martinez to anchor his filmed adaptation of the classic French novel, "Hussard sur le toit, Le" ("The Horseman on the Roof") (1995). With major approval under his belt, Martinez vaulted to international prominence working with one of France's top acting icons, Juliet Binoche. Paired up in the epic story of a woman searching for her husband in the midst of a cholera epidemic, the romance onscreen was subdued, as Martinez's Italian revolutionary Angelo Pardi was forced to suppress the onset of attraction. The press surrounding the film was as salacious as the film's romance was chaste, with reporters intent on gleaming details about the much hotter off-screen romance between him and Binoche - a highly-publicized relationship in which the couple lived together for three years.
No comments:
Post a Comment