French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz has been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident just outside of Paris. The accident occurred along the Autodrome de Montlhéry, a motor racing circuit not far from the city. Kassovitz was rushed to the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital, where he remains in serious condition with traumatic head injuries and a fractured pelvis. His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening, however.
The 56-year-old director first came to public prominence in 1995 with La Haine, a film he wrote and directed that called attention to the prevalence of racism and police violence in France. The film, in which he appeared with Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui, was released in the United States under the title Hate. It won the best director’s prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival as well as a best picture prize at the French César awards ceremony, the equivalent of the Oscars.
Kassovitz also worked on Amélie, Crimson Rivers, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. He plays the leading role in The Bureau, a spy thriller series that has achieved worldwide popularity. In his most recent project, he stars opposite Diane Kruger in Visions, a film that focuses on marital infidelity when his wife initiates an affair with her former girlfriend.
Despite his enthusiasm for motorcycles, Kassovitz told an interviewer in 2019 that he pictured himself “more an intellectual than a sportsman. “I like machines. I like the technicality of managing to handle them,” he declared. Kassovitz developed an interest in cycling while living in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, and got licensed after the age of forty.
Kassovitz is also the founder of MNP Enterprise, a film production company. The outspoken actor/director had been a fierce critic of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy; in his blog, he lambasted him for policies that “illuminate the purely demagogical and egocentric aspects of a puny, would-be Napoleon.”
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