At the end of the 70s, this famous French actor was still taking his first steps in the cinema. Did you recognize him in this short scene from “Gendarme and the Extraterrestrials”?
A leading French actor with a rich and diverse career, Lambert Wilson has been traveling on film sets for over 40 years now. Heartbreaking as Abbé Pierre in Hiver 54, unleashed as the villain of the Matrix saga, surprising in Marsupilami, poignant in Of Men and Gods, the man who recently played Commander Cousteau and General de Gaulle has also been nominated 7 times for the César .
However, even if everyone knows him today, he still had everything to prove 44 years ago, when at the end of the 70s, he played a small role in a French production for the first time.
Son of the famous actor Georges Wilson, dreaming of becoming an American actor, the young Lambert had already played a secondary (but quite substantial) role in Fred Zinneman’s historical drama, Julia. A film where we could see him opposite Jane Fonda (and in which a certain Meryl Streep also took her first steps as an actress).
20th Century Fox Lambert Wilson in “Julia”
Two years later, when he was just around twenty years old, Lambert Wilson participated in a short sequence in the new opus of a very popular French franchise: The Gendarme and the Extraterrestrials.
At the beginning of the film, while Louis de Funès and his teammates observe strange manifestations which lead them to suspect the arrival of invaders from elsewhere, one of these aliens visits a gendarme directly in the evening, so that the latter (played by Maurice Risch) is on duty. Dressed in jeans and a pair of sneakers, displaying a youthful appearance, the “Martian” in question is played by Lambert Wilson.
(Did you recognize which other famous actor is in this 1965 film?)
NCS
“We have no ill intentions towards your planet. Make it easy for us and we will be friends. We have sent a small reconnaissance group here to study the customs and behavior of the Earthlings in our country. mingling with the population”he exclaims in a metallic voice, thus uttering the very first words of his career in a French feature film, before disappearing in a dazzling flash and changing shape.
A few years later, Lambert Wilson will reunite with American director Fred Zinneman and play a much more important role opposite Sean Connery in Five Days that spring.
(Re)discover the trailer for this film…