 |
Simon Abkarian | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | March 5, 1962 Gonesse, Val-d'Oise, France |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1977–present |
Simon Abkarian (Armenian: Սիմոն Աբկարյան, born March 5, 1962) is a French-Armenian actor.
|
Simon Abkarian | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | March 5, 1962 Gonesse, Val-d'Oise, France |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1977–present |
Simon Abkarian (Armenian: Սիմոն Աբկարյան, born March 5, 1962) is a French-Armenian actor.
Born in Gonesse, Val d'Oise, of Armenian descent, Abkarian spent his childhood in Lebanon. He moved to Los Angeles, where he joined an Armenian theater company managed by Gerald Papazian. He returned to France in 1985, settling in Paris. He took classes at the Acting International school, then he joined Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil and played, among others, in L'Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge ("The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia") by Hélène Cixous, and in the House of Atreus four-play cycle by Aeschylus.
Abkarian left the Théâtre du Soleil in 1993. In 2001 he starred in Beast on the Moon by Richard Kalinoski, directed by Irina Brook, a play about the life of a survivor of the Armenian genocide, a role which won him critical acclaim and the Molière Award for Best Actor.
His first roles in cinema were proposed by French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch, who asked him to play in several of his movies, notably in Chacun cherche son chat ("When the Cat is Away", 1996) and in Ni pour ni contre (bien au contraire) in 2003.
He was featured in Sally Potter's Yes (2004), in which he played the lead role.
Abkarian then played Mehdi Ben Barka in the thriller J'ai vu tuer Ben Barka by Serge Le Péron, about the kidnapping and the murder of the leader of the Moroccan opposition. He then played in Prendre Femme by Ronit Elkabetz which won him several acting awards. Playing different roles and in different genres, he was featured in the adventure Zaïna, cavalière de l'Atlas by Bourlem Guerdjou, in the comedy Le Démon de midi by Marie-Pascale Osterrieth. He has also appeared in Atom Egoyan's Ararat (2002), he was Albert in Almost Peaceful (2004) by French director Michel Deville, and he was featured in Your Dreams (2005) by Denis Thybaud. He was featured as Sahak in the thriller Les Mauvais Joueurs ("The Gamblers") (2005) by Frédéric Balekdjian. He played the role of villain Alex Dimitrios in the James Bond film, Casino Royale . The character is an arms dealer working against Bond.
He has also been the voice of Ebi in the French version of the animated feature Persepolis . Abkarian played the role of the Armenian poet Missak Manouchian in The Army of Crime (2010) by Robert Guédiguian, a French filmmaker based in Marseilles, who is also of Armenian parentage.
He has also played Dariush Bakhshi, the Iranian Special Consul, in the BBC drama Spooks (MI-5). In 2012, he played the role of a drug-dealing Afghan army colonel in the Canal+ series Kaboul Kitchen .
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Biographical dictionaries | |
| Other | |
The French protectorate of Cambodia refers to the Kingdom of Cambodia when it was a French protectorate within French Indochina, a collection of Southeast Asian protectorates within the French Colonial Empire. The protectorate was established in 1863 when the Cambodian King Norodom requested the establishment of a French protectorate over his country, meanwhile Siam renounced suzerainty over Cambodia and officially recognised the French protectorate on Cambodia.
Missak Manouchian was a French-Armenian poet and communist activist. An Armenian genocide survivor, he moved to France from an orphanage in Lebanon in 1925. He was active in communist Armenian literary circles. During World War II, he became the military commissioner of FTP-MOI, a group consisting of European immigrants, including many Jews, in the Paris region which carried out assassinations and bombings of Nazi targets. According to one author, the Manouchian group was the most active French Resistance group. Manouchian and many of his comrades were arrested in November 1943 and executed by the Nazis in Fort Mont-Valérien on 21 February 1944. He is considered a hero of the French Resistance.
The Affiche Rouge is a notorious propaganda poster, distributed by Vichy France and German authorities in the spring of 1944 in occupied Paris, to discredit 23 immigrant French Resistance fighters, members of the Manouchian Group. The term Affiche Rouge also refers more broadly to the circumstances surrounding the poster's creation and distribution, the capture, trial and execution of these members of the Manouchian Group.
The Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d'œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI) were a sub-group of the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) organization, a component of the French Resistance. A wing composed mostly of foreigners, the MOI maintained an armed force to oppose the German occupation of France during World War II. The Main-d'œuvre immigrée was the "Immigrant Movement" of the FTP.
Ahmed Boukhari is a Moroccan former agent of Cab-1, the political cell of the DST. He claims to have taken part in the operation that masterminded the abduction and liquidation of Mehdi Ben Barka, and is as such one of the last surviving possible witnesses in the Benbarka Affair.
Georges-Auguste Figon was a French chemist who was a freelance barbouze. He arranged the meeting with Mehdi Ben Barka in the Brasserie Lipp in Paris. He later told L'Express that he knew who killed Barka and accused General Oufkir, whom Figon had seen torturing Barka.
Alexandre Adler is a French historian, journalist and expert of contemporary geopolitics, the former USSR, and the Middle East. He is a Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur (2002). A Maoist in his youth and then a member of the Communist Party (PCF), he shifted to the right at the end of the 1970s and has since become close to US neoconservatives, as did his wife Blandine Kriegel. Adler is the counsellor of Roger Cukiermann, chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France.
Armenians in France are French citizens of Armenian ancestry. The French Armenian community is, by far, the largest in the European Union and the third largest in the world, after Russia and the United States.
Serge Venturini is a French poet. Poet of devenir ("destiny"), several metamorphoses run through his poetry. From his poetics of human destiny, through post-human and transhuman poetics, he came to the transvisible thematic.
Marcel Rajman was a Polish Jew and volunteer fighter in the FTP-MOI group of French resistance fighters during World War II, and the head of "Stalingrad", a highly active militant group.
Chau Sen Cocsal, also known as Chhum, was a Cambodian civil servant and politician who served as Prime Minister of Cambodia in 1962 and President of the National Assembly twice, in 1962–1963 and 1966–1968. He lived for 103 years, 143 days, making him the longest-lived state leader in the world with the known date of birth and death. The only leader possibly longer living than him is another Cambodian prime minister, Ek Yi Oun (1910–2013). Chhum was awarded the honorary title "Samdech" in 1993 by King Norodom Sihanouk.
The Army of Crime is a 2009 French drama-war film directed by Robert Guédiguian and based on a story by Serge Le Péron, who is also one of three credited for the screenplay. It received a wide release in France on 16 September 2009 and opened in the United States in 2010.
Kaboul Kitchen is a French comedy television series broadcast by Canal+. It was created by Marc Victor, Allan Mauduit and Jean-Patrick Benes. The series is based on the true story of Radio France Internationale journalist Marc Victor, who ran a restaurant for French expatriates in Kabul until 2008. The first series premiered on February 15, 2012, on Canal+ and ended on March 5, 2012. It set a ratings record for comedy series in the primetime slot on Canal+. A second series of 12 episodes aired in France in 2014.
Mélinée Manouchian was a French-Armenian résistante and the widow of Missak Manouchian.
Cambodia–France relations are the bilateral relations between the Kingdom of Cambodia and the French Republic. Cambodia was a protectorate of France from 11 August 1863 to 9 November 1953. King Norodom approached the French in 1861, in an attempt to stop neighbors Thailand and Vietnam from swallowing Cambodia's land.
Sahak II Bagratuni, was an Armenian nobleman from the Bagratuni Dynasty. He served as the marzban of Persian Armenia briefly in 482.
I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed is a 2005 French-Moroccan film drama directed by Serge Le Péron and Saïd Smihi. The film is based on the Ben Barka affair.
Louise Aslanian was a French-Armenian communist and anti-fascist activist, writer, novelist, poet and a prominent figure in the French Resistance.
Arsène Tchakarian was a French-Armenian historian, former tailor and member of the French resistance. He was a member of the Manouchian Group of the FTP-MOI, a wing of the larger Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) composed of fighters of foreign immigrant origin. Tchakarian was the last surviving member of the Manouchian Group, a Paris-based resistance cell led by Missak Manouchian.
Boris Holban was a Russian-born Franco-Romanian communist known for his role in the French Resistance as the leader of FTP-MOI group in Paris and for l’Affaire Manouchian controversy of the 1980s.
