page_title: Lambert Wilson
section_title: First critical accolades
hierarchical_section_title: Lambert Wilson / Biography / First critical accolades
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Valérie Lemercier et Lambert Wilson au festival de Cannes.
context_page_description: Lambert Wilson is a French actor, singer and activist. He is best known internationally for his portrayal of The Merovingian in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.
context_section_description: Wilson released Musicals on the EMI label in 1989 (re-issued in 2004), with John McGlinn conducting Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. It features him singing songs of the American Musical Theatre catalogue, those well-known ("Maria" from West Side Story, "There But For You Go I" from Lerner & Loewe's Brigadoon, "The Cafe Song" from Les Misérables, "Johanna" from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd), rare ("Love Song" from Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's Love Life, "It Must Be So" from Leonard Bernstein's Candide, and "Silly People", which was cut from Sondheim's A Little Night Music), and those in-between ("Finishing the Hat" from Sunday in the Park with George, "You Do Something to Me" from Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen, "Never Will I Marry" from Frank Loesser's Greenwillow).
  He has directed stage presentations of Alfred de Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne starring Laure Marsac at Paris' Bouffes du Nord as well as Jean Racine's Bérénice starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Didier Sandre at Avignon and then Chaillot.
  In 1989, his performance as Abbé Pierre in the film Hiver 54, l'abbé Pierre, for which he received the Jean Gabin prize, won him critical accolades. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, his screen career suffered from a series of box office failures, such as The Possessed and El Dorado.
  He later said that the French producers had come, at the time, to regard him as "box office poison". He eventually won back the favours of French audiences by appearing in the successful comedies Same Old Song (1997) and Jet Set (2000).
  Wilson was cast in the role of The Merovingian in The Matrix Reloaded (2002) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), perhaps his best-known role in the American cinema. Being completely fluent in English, his strong French accent in the film is fabricated for the role. The role also popularised the Ediety tie knot, now commonly referred to as "The Merovingian".
caption: Valérie Lemercier and Lambert Wilson at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival
exif: {}