A man of many worlds: Simon Abkarian

He was born in Gonesse, outside Paris, and raised amid the chaos of Lebanon's civil war. Hardened by the Armenian diaspora of Los Angeles and forged on the radical stages of the French capital, he carries few peers in the breadth of worlds within him, and perhaps that is precisely why Simon Abkarian was the only man who could play Charles de Gaulle.

At this year's Cannes Film Festival, the French-Armenian actor received a standing ovation for his portrayal of the legendary general and statesman in the sweeping historical epic “De Gaulle: Tilting Iron”, a production already being described, in French cinema circles, as a work of rare and nearly unprecedented ambition. The response, by all accounts, was as much a tribute to the actor as to the film itself.

From Beirut to Paris

Abkarian's story is inseparable from displacement. Born in France to a Lebanese Armenian family, his parents returned to Lebanon before the war of 1975. The conflict eventually forced them to flee, first back to France, then onward to Los Angeles. It was in that city of reinvention that Abkarian discovered theater, joining an Armenian theater company run by the charismatic director Gerald Papasian, who was running a troupe for the AGBU.

He returned to France in 1985, settling in Paris, where he took classes at the Acting International school before joining Ariane Mnouchkine's legendary Théâtre du Soleil. Mnouchkine, one of the most demanding directors in European theater, became a formative influence, teaching Abkarian a discipline and physicality that would define his screen presence for decades. He performed in Hélène Cixous's epic The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, and in Aeschylus's sweeping House of Atreus four-play cycle.

A career defined by historical weight

Abkarian has long been drawn to figures who carry the burden of history. He earned critical acclaim for his portrayal of the Armenian American painter Arshile Gorky in Atom Egoyan's award-winning epic Ararat (2002) and won awards for his performance in Israeli director Ronit Elkabetz's Ve'Lakhta Lehe Isha (2004).

International audiences came to know him through blockbuster cinema: in the James Bond film Casino Royale, he played Alex Dimitros, a Greek contractor for the villain Le Chiffre, facing off against Daniel Craig's 007. But it is his work in French-language cinema that traces the deepest line through his identity. He played the Armenian poet and resistance leader Missak Manouchian in Robert Guédiguian's Army of Crime (2010), a role that struck close to home. "It affected me because my character is Armenian, and I'm Armenian," Abkarian said of the role. "Manouchian has this vision of France, a little idealized."

That sense of idealized devotion, to a country, to a people, to a cause, is precisely what makes Abkarian's casting as de Gaulle feel so resonant. The General, after all, was a man animated by an almost mythological love of France: unbending, solitary, grandly impractical. In De Gaulle: Tilting Iron, Abkarian inhabits the contradiction at de Gaulle's core, the fragility beneath the granite.

An actor without borders

Throughout his career, Abkarian has been generously involved in the humanitarian causes of the Armenian people across the world, and his art has consistently reflected his commitment to memory, identity, and the experience of those displaced by history. He has moved between Greek tragedy and spy thrillers, between Beirut and Cannes, between the margins of diaspora life and the very center of French cultural prestige.  The standing ovation at Cannes a recognition that Simon Abkarian, shaped by exile, war, and three cultures, had arrived at the role of a lifetime. And that he had been preparing for it all along.