Charlotte Rampling kept a family secret from her mother for decades
For most of her life Rampling told people her sister Sarah died of a brain haemorrhage. She and her father had agreed her mother must never learn it was suicide, and they held that line until 2001. Years later she named a character in Swimming Pool after Sarah, bringing her sister back into her work.
Tessa Charlotte Rampling was born on 5 February 1946 in Sturmer, Essex. Her mother painted; her father, Godfrey, was an army officer and Olympic champion runner. She spent much of her childhood in Gibraltar, France and Spain, and as teenagers she and Sarah sang French chansons together on stage. Sarah died in 1967 at 23, not long after a premature birth.
Rampling started as a model, first in an advert for Cadbury, and was spotted by a casting agent while working as a secretary. She has uncredited moments in A Hard Day's Night and The Knack, then a real part as Meredith in Georgy Girl. She became a face of the Swinging Sixties, though she later described the era as far unhappier than it looked, with everyone too drugged to notice.
Her reputation was built on difficult roles. In Visconti's The Damned in 1969 she played a young wife deported to a concentration camp, and her co-star Dirk Bogarde coined a name for her enigmatic stare: "The Look". Five years later, opposite Bogarde again in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, she played a camp survivor drawn back into a disturbing bond with her former guard. Hollywood followed, from Farewell, My Lovely with Robert Mitchum to Sidney Lumet's The Verdict. She has said she picks parts that force her past her own limits rather than parts that entertain.
Depression kept her out of view for about ten years. The French director François Ozon drew her back in the 2000s with films such as Under the Sand, and a late run of honours followed. In 2015 she and Tom Courtenay both won Silver Bears in Berlin for 45 Years, a portrait of a marriage shaken before its anniversary, and she was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. Two years later Venice gave her the Volpi Cup for Hannah. She wrote her memoir in French, then worked on the English version, Who I Am.
Source: Charlotte Rampling
