Lambert Wilson (born 3 August 1958) is a French actor, singer, and activist. He is best known internationally for his portrayal of The Merovingian in The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections. Biography Early life Wilson is the son of Georges Wilson, who was an actor, theatrical manager and director of the Théâtre National Populaire. As a teenager, he had little interest in the French theatre and aimed to become an "American actor" and appear in Hollywood pictures. He studied acting at the Drama Centre London to learn English. He played his first movie role in the 1977 American film Julia, directed by Fred Zinneman. Five years later, he played his first starring role in another film by Zinneman, Five Days One Summer, opposite Sean Connery. But the film was not a commercial success, and neither was Sahara in which Wilson co-starred with Brooke Shields. Wilson ultimately found success in his home country: during the 1980s, he became popular with French audiences by appearing in successful films such as La Boum 2, The Public Woman and Rendez-vous. At the time, he was often cast either as tormented characters or in romantic parts, although he found himself more convincing in the former kind of roles. Wilson screen tested for The Living Daylights (1987) for the role of James Bond, appearing in test footage opposite Maryam d'Abo (the Bond girl in The Living Daylights) as Tatiana Romanova, re-enacting scenes from From Russia with Love (1963). In 1991, Wilson was featured in a series of Calvin Klein ads for its Eternity perfume brand, featuring Christy Turlington, reuniting for a poster ad in 1998. First critical accolades 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