Vincent Lindon, the actor of working France, takes on Jean Valjean

Vincent Lindon

Photo: Elena Ternovaja / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 15, 1959 Boulogne-Billancourt, France
Occupation	Actor
Known for	La Haine, Titane, Betty Blue
Awards	Best Actor, Cannes Film Festival · César · Volpi Cup · Lumière · Los Angeles Film Critics Association · Swann d'Or

In Fred Cavayé’s Les Misérables, Vincent Lindon spends close to three hours as Jean Valjean, the convict who steals a loaf of bread and pays for it with most of his life. Few French actors arrived at the part by such a direct road. Over a decade of films with Stéphane Brizé he played a jobless man counting what was left of his savings, a union leader trying to stop a factory closure and an executive ordered to cut more jobs. Somewhere in between, he lent Valjean’s name to a tax on the very rich. Now the question is whether audiences will follow him into a blockbuster built on that convict.

The irony starts in the family tree. His great-grandmother Fernande was the elder sister of the carmaker André Citroën, and his grandfather Raymond Lindon was a senior magistrate who served as mayor of Étretat for three decades. His uncle Jérôme Lindon ran Les Éditions de Minuit, the Paris house that published Samuel Beckett. The actor who became French cinema’s face of precarious work grew up a long way from it.

He was born on 15 July 1959 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris, the son of the businessman Laurent Lindon and the journalist Alix Dufaure. He enrolled in business school after the Lycée Victor-Duruy and walked out after twenty-two days. Film came in through a side door. In 1979 his mother found him an internship as a costume assistant on Alain Resnais’s My American Uncle, where part of the job was looking after Gérard Depardieu. A year in New York promoting records for an uncle’s label followed, then a crew job on the comedian Coluche’s 1981 tour and, finally, the Cours Florent drama school.

For his first two decades on screen he was a leading man of popular French comedy and romance, a jittery charmer. Coline Serreau’s The Crisis brought his first César nomination for best actor in 1993. The 2000s pulled him toward auteurs. Claire Denis cast him in Friday Night, and Emmanuel Carrère’s The Moustache won him the Swann d’Or at Cabourg in 2005. In 2008 Cavayé, then a first-time director, gave him Anything for Her, as a teacher plotting to break his wife, played by Diane Kruger, out of prison. A year later Philippe Lioret’s Welcome made him a swimming coach in Calais who trains a young Kurdish refugee to cross the Channel.

The César kept escaping him. He was nominated for best actor in 1993, 2000, 2008, 2010 and 2013, and lost each time. The turn came through Brizé, who had already paired him with his former wife Sandrine Kiberlain in Mademoiselle Chambon and then cast him as a son who moves back in with his terminally ill mother in A Few Hours of Spring. In The Measure of a Man, Lindon played Thierry, a man of 51 out of work for twenty months who takes a job as a supermarket security guard and ends up watching his own colleagues, surrounded by a mostly non-professional cast. The film won Lindon best actor at Cannes in 2015 and, the following February, the first César of his career.

Brizé turned the collaboration into a trilogy. At War, in 2018, made Lindon Laurent Amédéo, the union representative leading 1,100 workers against the closure of their plant. Another World, released in 2022, crossed to the other side of the table: Philippe Lemesle, a senior manager told to deliver another round of layoffs while his marriage to Anna, played by Kiberlain, comes apart.

The worker image is the part of Lindon’s reputation that deserves the hardest look, because he has built it off screen as carefully as on. In 2007 he spoke at the launch of François Bayrou’s centrist party. In May 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, he recorded a long video for Mediapart attacking the government’s handling of the crisis and proposing a “Jean Valjean tax” on large fortunes for the poorest households. The objection is obvious, an heir of Citroën and Minuit speaking for the dispossessed, and the films answer it better than the speeches. In Brizé’s work he plays among non-professionals without ever condescending to them, quieter than anyone around him, a big body that seems to apologise for taking up room. The speeches have made him easy to caricature as a moralist, and that caricature now walks into cinemas beside Valjean.

In Julia Ducournau’s Titane, which won the Palme d’Or in 2021, he was Vincent, an ageing fire captain on steroids who takes in a stranger claiming to be his lost son; the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named him best supporting actor. The following year he presided over the Cannes jury, succeeding Spike Lee, and handed Ruben Östlund a second Palme d’Or for Triangle of Sadness. Östlund later cast him alongside Keanu Reeves and Kirsten Dunst in The Entertainment System Is Down, still without a release date.

In 2024 he received the Volpi Cup for best actor at Venice for Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s The Quiet Son, as Pierre, a widowed railway worker and former trade unionist whose elder son, played by Benjamin Voisin, drifts toward the far right. That May he had opened Cannes in Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act. He then played a doctor opposite Angelina Jolie in Alice Winocour’s Couture.

Les Misérables reached French cinemas on 14 October 2026, with Tahar Rahim as Javert, Noémie Merlant as Fantine and Camille Cottin and Benjamin Lavernhe as the Thénardiers. It is Lindon’s third film with Cavayé, after Anything for Her and the thriller Mea Culpa. The film opened as the top new release of its week, and reached 480,822 admissions after seven days. For a production reported at between 33 and 41 million euros, that is short: Le Parisien estimated it would need four to five million admissions to cover its costs, against projections of 1.5 to 2 million.

In the 1980s he spent nearly ten years with Claude Chirac, daughter of the future president, and later had a much-photographed romance with Princess Caroline of Monaco. His son Marcel was born in 1996. He married Kiberlain in 1998, two years before the birth of their daughter Suzanne, and they separated in the early 2000s. He has spoken since the start of his career about the nervous tics of Tourette syndrome, and told Thierry Ardisson in 1990 that they disappear once the camera rolls.

The next test is already scheduled. A Good Little Soldier, his sixth film with Brizé, competed at Venice in September and reaches French cinemas through Gaumont on 25 November 2026, with Alba Rohrwacher as an insurance company’s new HR manager who uncovers toxic management. This time the camera moves into the offices where the targets are set, and Lindon, after Valjean, goes back to the territory that made him.