February 5, 1946 - Charlotte Rampling, OBE (born February 5, 1946 in Sturmer, Essex) is an English actress and former model (her height is 170 cm (5' 7")). She attended Jeanne d'Arc Académie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles and St. Hilda's School, a boarding school in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England. Rampling has often performed controversial roles. In 1969, in Luchino Visconti's The Damned (La Caduta degli dei), she played a young wife sent to a concentration camp. This role redrew Rampling entirely as mysterious, tragic, even sinister. "The Look" as co-star Dirk Bogarde called it, became her trademark. In 1974's The Night Porter she portrayed a former concentration camp inmate entangled in a sado-masochistic relationship with her former guard, played by Bogarde. Rampling's 2005 film at age 59 was Laurent Cantet's Heading South (Vers le Sud), a film about female sexual tourism. She plays Ellen, a professor of French literature and single Englishwoman, who holidays in 1970s Haiti to get the sexual attention she does not get at home. On her choice of roles, Rampling says, "I generally don't make films to entertain people. I choose the parts that challenge me to break through my own barriers. A need to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it's certainly a big part of sex. To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness." Other roles embody a personal twist: The character she played in François Ozon's Swimming Pool (2003) Sarah Morton was named after her oldest sister Sarah who, after giving birth prematurely in 1966, committed suicide at the age of 23. For most of Rampling's life she would say only that her sister had died of a brain hemorrhage; when she and her father heard the news, they agreed they would never let Charlotte's mother know the truth. They kept their secret until Rampling's mother died in 2001. In 1995, Empire (magazine) voted Rampling #97 out of 100 of the Sexiest Stars in history while she was one of People Magazines "50 Most Beautiful People" in May 2001. (Wikipedia.org)