Charlotte Rampling, OBE (born February 5, 1946 in Sturmer, Essex, England, UK) is an English actress and former model (her height is 170 cm (5' 7")). She attended Jeanne d'Arc Academie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles and St. Hilda's School in Bushey, Hertfordshire , England.
After beginning her acting career at age seventeen in a starring commercial role and working as a model for a while, Rampling's first screen role was uncredited as a water skier in Richard Lester's film The Knack...and How to Get It in 1965 which was followed a year later by the role of Meredith in the film Georgy Girl. After this her acting career blossomed in both English and French cinema.
Despite her early flurry of success, she told The Independent, "We weren't happy. It was a nightmare, breaking the rules and all that. Everyone seemed to be having fun, but they were taking so many drugs they wouldn't know it anyway." She often takes roles which portray her as the villain or as a 'bitch'; an exception was in an episode of The Avengers, as female gunslinger Hana Wilde, where she nearly stole the show from stars Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. She has often performed controversial roles; in The Night Porter (1974) she portrayed a former concentration camp inmate enmeshed in a sado-masochistic relationship with her former guard, played by Dirk Bogarde.
Remaining popular in the 1990s, Rampling got a name-check in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, as a celebrity Edina Monsoon (played by Jennifer Saunders) hoped to impress. Her 2005 film at age 59 was Laurent Cantet's Heading South (Vers le Sud), a film about female sexual tourism. She plays Ellen, a professor of French literature and single Englishwoman, who holidays in 1970s Haiti to get the sexual attention she does not get at home.
In 1972, she married the actor Bryan Southcombe. They lived in a ménage à trois with a male model and had one child, Barnaby, before divorcing in 1976. Barnaby is now a successful television director. In 1978, she married the French composer Jean Michel Jarre and had one child, the magician David Jarre. The marriage was dissolved in the late 1990s when she found out via tabloid newspaper stories about Jarre's affairs with other women. She is expected to marry Jean-Noel Tassez, a business consultant and her fiancé since 1998 soon.
She credits Francois Ozon with drawing her back to film in the 2000s, a period when she came to terms with the death of her sister Sarah in the 1960s. The family kept details secret from her mother until she died in 2001. Her sister shot herself in Argentina in 1966, aged 23, after giving birth prematurely.
