Christophe Lambert
by Dale Kern

He is best known to American audiences as the sensual, brooding,
animal-magnetic lead in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan.

He played a spiky-bleached-blond misguided innocent opposite Isabella Adjani in Luc Besson's French thriller, Subway. In Highlander, the strange action-packed fantasy film he starred in with Sean Connery, he was an immortal Scottish Highlander who looked great in a kilt. In Love Songs, a recent French film with Catherine Deneuve, he played a musician torn between his career and the love of a woman. But it is his latest film, The Sicilian, scheduled to be released this summer, that is likely to make Christophe Lambert a household name.

The Sicilian is a big-budget epic based on Mario Puzo's best-selling novel, scripted by Steve Shagan and Michael Cimino and directed by Cimino. Lambert has the starring role as Salvatore Giuliano, a real-life Robin Hood figure who had a short, bloody, and infamous career in the late Forties. The flamboyant bandit, whose exploits and self-styled grandeur earned him a following among the destitute Sicilian peasants, dreamed of turning Sicily in a U.S. State. Betrayed, he was eventually trapped in a farmhouse and gunned down by the carabinieri, who had pursued him for years.

At Le Dome (one of Hollywood's hottest luncheon spots), the New York-born, Paris-raised actor-sporting a rakish not-un-bandit-like stubble and one of filmdom's most disarming smiles, a striped cotton Polo sweatshirt, and jeans-chainsmoked Marlboros, wolfed Poulet grille, and talked unassumingly about life and work.

"There was a big misunderstanding," he says of getting The Sicilian. Having met Lambert and discussed the possibility of working with him, Cimino, the controversial director of The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, asked him to read with the cast for a whole week. Although Lambert thought the readings had gone very well, Cimino did not offer him the part-because the director thought his invitation to read with the cast constituted an offer. Once they unraveled the I-thought-he-thought-confusion, however, actor and director got along like a house on fire. "He's amazingly generous," says Lambert. "If you had squeezed him at the end of the movie, there would have been nothing left in his body."

Lambert studied acting at Paris' prestigious Conservatoire. "It was highly intellectual," he reports wrily. "They wanted to change your personality to match the teacher's personality. I was thrown out. Two months later, Greystoke happened."

As directed by Hugh Hudson, the Tarzan role in Greystoke took two years out of Lambert's life, including "six months, 12 hours a day of gymnastics; 'chimping' ,nonstop: English. I had no idea what to expect. The first month I thought I wanted to kill my trainer."

But Lambert has not worked with just the great directors-there have also been some of the most beautiful women on screen. "What can I say?" he says, smiling broadly. "I've been lucky. Deneuve is strong and very giving-a very strong woman. Adjani is black and white, an angel, and a devil-- which is mainly why I love her. I've enjoyed shooting every movie I've ever made, " he adds, "though watching them is a different problem:; I am paranoid. But each movie is a step forward, big or small." While the industry is not beating down his door to have him star in all the hottest new films,he does get more than his share of scripts."The most important thing is not to put yourself apart or think you're different. You're lucky enough to do a job you're passionate about. A lot of people don't realize that it's luck. And it might go away."

Lambert is very private when it comes to family.An American citizen who left this country when he was two years old, he is the son of French parents who have finally gotten used to his being an actor. When he was younger, his father, a former diplomat, tried to "reason with him,"" with the result that Lambert spent a short month working at a brokerage house in London-a time he recalls as "very boring."

Asked whether there is anyone special in his life, he's quick to answer: "Most of the time I have no one special. I'm not looking to be married at the moment." Probably most at home on a jet, he claims to be unable to stay in one place. Currently he calls Geneva home, plans to move to America permanently, and for now jockeys among New Your, London, Paris, LA., and various movie locations.

"I never calculate what I'll do in the future. Just to keep working-- that's what it's all about."

Lambert takes off his glasses, rubs his deep-set eyes, and then looks wistfully out the window into the bright California sunlight. "Sometimes in the middle of the night, I look up into the sky without my glasses on and I see something moving," he says hopefully, then adds, " I put on my glasses and see that it's only a star."

He puts on his glasses, stubs out his umpteenth Marlboro, and says, quite casually, "I had this weird dream a couple of months ago that I was being kidnapped by a UFO. It would be very exciting . I'd like to be kidnapped by a UFO, no kidding, that's my real dream."