Ulrich Thomsen

Fair-haired Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen initially sailed to fame on the basis of his lead role in the Dogme 95 Thomas Vinterberg-directed seriocomedy The Celebration (1998). In that film, Thomsen played Christian, a restaurant proprietor headquartered in France, who scandalizes his entire family by accusing the patriarch of improprieties. After a pair of more conventional Hollywood productions -- the James Bond actioner The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Kathryn Bigelow's cerebral drama The Weight of Water (2000) -- Thomsen returned to audience-pleasing arthouse work with a key supporting role in the offbeat comedy Mostly Martha (2001), then tackled additional supporting turns in transcontinental productions including Max (2002), Sergeant Pepper (2004), and Allegro (2005). Kingdom of Heaven (2005) -- an epic about the Crusades -- marked Thomsen's return to elephantine-budgeted Hollywood productions, demonstrating the actor's crossover appeal. He next landed a lead in the Danish farce Clash of Egos, about a dad who gets sweet revenge on a pretentious director thanks to an ugly accident on a movie set, and then played the lead in the psychodrama Opium: Diary of a Madwoman (2007), as a morphine-addicted neurologist who makes a warped pact with a disturbed young woman.