Brian Cox

It was by sweeping the corridors of the theater in his hometown at the age of fourteen that the Scottish Brian Cox approached the stage and decided to embark on an artistic career. He continued his apprenticeship at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts then made his first appearance on the stage in London in 1967 in an adaptation of Comme il vous plaira . After trying his hand at television and film (Nicholas and Alexandra in 1971, in which he played Leon Trotsky), the actor decided to return to Scotland, where he had a brilliant theatrical career.

Five years before Anthony Hopkins, the actor played the dark doctor Hannibal Lecter in The Sixth Sense (1986), but his cinematographic appearances remained fairly isolated until the mid-90s. Brian Cox indeed favored the stage and television, if this is not a noteworthy performance in Ken Loach's Hidden Agenda in 1990. His big-screen career didn't really start until 1995, when he appeared in Rob Roy as brother of Liam Neeson. From then on, the actor collects the characters of mentor and patriarch: the uncle of Mel Gibson in Braveheart, the former teacher of Geena Davis in Goodbye, forever, the leader of the IRA in The Boxer or the father. by Mark Wahlberg in The Corruptor.

Having become very prolific in the cinema since 2000, Brian Cox also likes to play troubled and ambiguous roles: a pedophile in Long Island Expressway (LIE) (2002), a formidable head of the secret services in La Mémoire dans la peau (id.), the evil General Stryker faced by the mutants of X-Men 2 (2003) or the greedy king of Mycenae Agamemnon in Troy (2004), the account of the Iliad revisited by Wolfgang Petersen. He is the broke uncle of loser Johnny Knoxville in The Ringer and then appears as a dad on Wes Craven (Red Eye / High Pressure) and Woody Allen for Match Point. Cox is part of the cast of the sequel to The Memory in the Skin: Death in the Skin. Still filming for television, he was hired for a season in the Deadwood series.

He was a gangster in The Key Man before filming David Fincher's Zodiac and performed a few voices in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Agent Crush. But Brian Cox has an advantage, he's not his age. Thus in 2008, at the age of 62, he obtained two leading roles: in Red where he played an old man who wanted to avenge the unjust death of his dog (a role which earned him an acting prize) then in Ultime Evasion, where he played a criminal who escapes to see his seriously ill daughter. The following year, he was a bar owner taking Paul Dano under his wing for The Good Heart. He then amazes in a black comedy about a stubborn old man named Wally who seeks by all means to enforce the last wishes of his deceased friend in Wide blue yonder. In 2010,

After the first decade of 2000, Brian Cox was drawn to historical films: a peplum, Coriolanus, and a medieval film (Le Sang des Templiers). In 2011, he participated in the sequel to the Planet of the Apes in 1967, in Rise of the Apes.