C’est grâce aux risques que l’on prend que la vie devient vivable.
- Charlotte Rampling
It was amazing to see Charlotte Rampling struts the catwalk at 76 years old at the Ami Paris Fall/Winter 2023-2024 fashion show during Paris Fashion Week 2023 last week.
Next to Jane Birkin and Kristin Scott Thomas, Charlotte Rampling must count as one of Britian’s finest exports to France. She’s been a French acting and style icon since the 1960s and she still has a youthful attitide to life. Tragedy in her life has forged her character - the suicide of a beloved sister at 20 years old just as she was becoming an known actress, a buried secret she only recently came to terms with after 40 years. But she is resolutely stoic and positive.
With her intellect, extraordinary beauty, and, of course, her supreme versatility as an actor, it’s little wonder that Charlotte Rampling has served as a muse to filmmakers and fashion designers alike throughout her six-decade career. Whether it was her early days as a model in Swinging Sixties London that saw her become a favourite of Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Newton, or her career revival over the past two decades working regularly with auteurs like François Ozon - or even her regular appearances in some of Juergen Teller’s most risqué photographs throughout the 1990s - there is something ineffable about Rampling’s appeal that draws us back to her again and again.
Like Catherine Deneuve, Helen Mirren and Sigourney Weaver, Charlotte Rampling is one of those actresses who continue to shine in the cinema after 70 years. She is proud of her age and does not rely on plastic surgery to try and look younger. She once said to a French newspaper, "I don't need to have surgery, that’s just for the insecure and the shallow. Beauty is in the ageing, like fine wine.” For her, the ageing process is something to be taken philosophically: "I'm a bit fascinated by the fact that my face ages."
