Gérard Watkins

Gérard Watkins

Birth : 1965-07-04, London, England, UK

History

Gérard Watkins is an English-French actor, playwright, director, and songwriter. As a stage actor he has performed in over forty productions in Paris with such directors as Véronique Bellegarde, Julie Beres, Jean-Claude Buchard, Elizabeth Chailloux, Michel Didym, André Engel, Frederic Fisbach, Marc François, Daniel Jeanneteau, Philipe Lanton, Jean-Louis Martinelli, Lars Noren, Claude Régy, Yann Ritsema, Bernard Sobel, Viviane Theophilides, and Jean-Pierre Vincent. Among his critically acclaimed performances are Ian in Sarah Kane's Blasted, Edmond in King Lear, and Rosalind in As you Like it. In the Cinema he is perhaps best known for his role in the 2009 film Taken as Patrice Saint Clair, the sex trafficking kingpin that runs the operation that kidnapped the protagonist's 17-year old daughter, but he has also performed with directors as Julie Lopez Curval, Jérome Salle, Yann Samuel, Julian Schnabel, Hugo Santiago, and Peter Watkins. Since 1994 he has directed his own theatre company, the Perdita Ensemble, where he has staged all of his plays, the Secret Capital, Follow Me, The Tower, In the Faraway Forest, Icone, Identity, Lost, and I Don't Remember Very Well.

Profile

Gérard Watkins

Movies

Our Brothers
Le directeur de l'IGS
Inspired by the story of Malik Oussekine, an affair of police violence which is believed to have caused the death of 22-year-old Malik Oussekine on the night of 5-6 December 1986, following several weeks of student protests against a university reform bill
Normandy Nude
Volker
At the Mêle sur Sarthe, a small Norman village, farmers are affected by a crisis. Georges Balbuzard, the mayor of the city, is not one to let them down and decides to try everything to save his village ...
The Odyssey
Le maître de cérémonie
The aquatic adventure of the highly influential and fearlessly ambitious pioneer, innovator, filmmaker, researcher, and conservationist, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, covers roughly thirty years of an inarguably rich in achievements life.
Le monde qui nous perd
Avocat partie civile
Colt 45
Calhoun
Vincent Miles, a gunsmith and shooting instructor at the National Police, is an expert in combat shooting who stubbornly refuses to join a field brigade, a choice which their colleagues do not understand. When he meets Milo Cardena, a mysterious and skilled cop, his life changes in such way that he cannot ignore his true nature anymore.
The Ponzi Scheme
Banquier Chmelinski
Ponzi, from his arrival in Boston in 1903, to hi death in Rio in 1949. He made himself famous in inventing the first fraud of modern times on a large scale, and inspired Bernard Madoff.
Silences d'état
Stéphane Ferran
Solitudes
Le capitaine de police
One night, an interpreter translates a Romanian prostitute's testimony.
Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs)
Detective
Filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan makes a self-referential movie about a fictional attempt to make a Grace Slick biopic.
Plein sud
Le père
In the summer, 27 year-old Sam drives towards the south of France in his Ford. He meets Matthieu and his sister Léa and takes them along in his apparently aimless journey. Matthieu has a crush on Sam and tries to seduce him. Léa is a beautiful, young, provocative girl who likes men so much that she got pregnant. She soon brings along Jérémie with them. Throughout the trip, they learn to know, fight and love each other. In spite of a blooming relationship with Matthieu, Sam isolates himself because of his secret: he is headed for Spain to find his long-lost mother.
Hidden Diary
Gilles
In the 1950s, Louise left her husband when their children were still little. She was never heard from again. Her daughter Martine stayed in the small seaside town, where she became a doctor. Martine's daughter, Audrey, a thirty-year-old independent woman, returns to visit her parents. By chance, she finds a notebook that belonged to her grandmother, a diary that may at last explain her departure. Will it reveal the things left unsaid, that have altered the relationships within the heart of the family ever since? In it, will Audrey find answers to the questions that she is asking herself about her own future?
The Invisible Woman
Paul
The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
Cattaneo
After a powerful billionaire is murdered, his secret adoptive son must race to prove his legitimacy, find his father's killers and stop them from taking over his financial empire.
Taken
Patrice Saint-Clair
While vacationing with a friend in Paris, an American girl is kidnapped by a gang of human traffickers intent on selling her into forced prostitution. Working against the clock, her ex-spy father must pull out all the stops to save her. But with his best years possibly behind him, the job may be more than he can handle.
The Feelings Factory
Michel
A successful woman searches for romance by speed dating in this drama. Eloise has a great job and a great education, but she's looking for love. Can a couple of minutes be the key to finding true love?
Le Roi Lear
Edmund
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Doctor Cocheton
The true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind.
Je me fais rare
Acteur 1
Daniel, a filmmaker is convinced that cinema is dying as an art form, and thinks he is a new Don Quichotte.
They Came Back
Le fils du maire
The lives of the residents of a small French town are changed when thousands of the recently dead inexplicably come back to life and try to integrate themselves into society that has changed for them.
Love Me If You Dare
Julien's Father
As adults, best friends Julien and Sophie continue the odd game they started as children -- a fearless competition to outdo one another with daring and outrageous stunts. While they often act out to relieve one another's pain, their game might be a way to avoid the fact that they are truly meant for one another.
La Commune (Paris, 1871)
Gérard Bourlet
We are in the year 1871. A journalist for Versailles Television broadcasts a soothing and official view of events while a Commune television is set up to provide the perspectives of the Paris rebels. On a stage-like set, more than 200 actors interpret characters of the Commune, especially the Popincourt neighbourhood in the XIth arrondissement. They voice their own thoughts and feelings concerning the social and political reforms. The scenes consist mainly of long camera takes.
The Wolf of the West Coast
Harry
James Faulkner plays Lew Millar, a renowned private eye who is hired by a gangster to be his bodyguard. When Millar arrives at the criminal's French hideaway, the gangster is already dead. Among the people Millar investigates are the gangster's brother, the man's sister-in-law, and their teenage daughter. A judge may also offer insight into the case, as well as Millar's own past.
Les danseurs du Mozambique
Le chasseur
A novelist finds herself in an auction where two statuettes are up for sale: "The Mozambique Dancers". According to the legend, the one who owns both statues becomes infinitely rich but the one who owns only one of the two pieces is cursed forever...
L'ambassade en folie
Techtronics guard #1
A philandering executive tries to juggle two wives and a mistress, and finds himself suddenly being shadowed by some angry Russian holdouts from the Cold War.
New York 1935
Un invité
Travelling avant
Paris, October 1948. Nino, Gilles, Donald, Barbara and their friends are a new breed of spectators. They discover the cinema as art, they are moviegoers. They will try to realize their grand project: to found a film club. "My film first wants to be a testimony of young people who have lived for a passion. Cinema"
Public Security
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Tempted by an important contract, Anna, a renowned writer, agrees to write a screenplay. But she lacks inspiration. She talks to her old university professor. No solution... Or maybe one... Take inspiration from reality. Desperate to express what seems to her to be clichés, Anna sees her life turned upside down after her husband's arrest, when a dancer is found murdered. A tornado, against a backdrop of police drama, her scenario takes shape. Her husband, innocent, is released, the murderer is still at large.
On a volé Charlie Spencer!
Le soldat américain du film
Students of film history will appreciate the many tributes to famous films of yore which appear in this first-time feature directed and written by former drama teacher Francis Huster. In the story, a mild-mannered bank clerk has heroic dreams of being a real he-man. Given his diffident, shy nature, it comes as a bit of a surprise that not only does he actually have a girlfriend, but he has managed to get her pregnant. However, she doesn't fit his image of himself, and he can't bring himself to marry her. When the bank he works in is robbed by a daring group which includes a magnetically attractive woman, the clerk throws his lot in with them and becomes an outlaw.