Michael Lonsdale
Actor
- Born
- May 24, 1931 · Paris, France
- Died
- September 21, 2020 (age 89)
Michael Edward Lonsdale Crouch (24 May 1931 – 21 September 2020), commonly known as Michael Lonsdale and sometimes as Michel Lonsdale, was a French-British actor and author who appeared in over 180 films and television shows. He is often known in the English-speaking world for his roles as the villain Hugo Drax in the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker, deputy police commissioner Claude Lebel in The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Abbot in The Name of the Rose (1986) and Dupont d'Ivry in The Remains of the Day (1993).
Lonsdale was born in Paris, the natural son of British Army officer Edward Lonsdale Crouch and Simone Calderon (née Béraud). He was brought up initially on the island of Jersey, then in London from 1935, and later, during the Second World War, in Casablanca, Morocco.
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He returned to Paris to study painting in 1947, but was drawn into the world of acting instead, first appearing on stage at the age of 24. Lonsdale was bilingual, and appeared in both English-language and French-language productions. He appeared in a starring role with Roger Moore in the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker. and with Sean Connery, in the 1986 film The Name of the Rose. He would later appear in Munich (2005), a film that also starred another Bond, Daniel Craig.
In February 2011, he won a César Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Of Gods and Men.
Lonsdale was also the author of ten books.
A practising Roman Catholic, he was close to the Emmanuel Community.
In his 2016 memoir Le Dictionnaire de Ma Vie, Lonsdale revealed he had fallen for Delphine Seyrig, having met her as a student in Tania Balachova's acting classes at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1947. He wrote that "it was her or nothing", which was why he never married.
Lonsdale died in Paris on 21 September 2020, aged 89.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Michael Lonsdale, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Known for
Acting196
- 2025The Life of Mirrors
- 2024African Glory as Christopher Columbus
- 2023The Outsider as Narrator (Voice)
- 2022An Oral History of: The Name of the Rose as Self (archive footage)
- 2021So Long Michael as Himself
- 2020Le Fantôme de Laurent Terzieff as Self
- 2019Degas and I as Edgar Degas
- 2019Salvador Dalí: Génie tragi-comique as Narrator
- 2017Bazin's Film as Narrator
- 2016Sculpt
