Each February, France’s premier glittering award ceremony takes place, honouring the best that its impressive film industry has to offer. And as with its American equivalent – the Academy Awards Ceremony – the announcement of who is to present the awards ceremony itself is awaited with baited breath amongst the French-speaking public.
The role of Maître de Cérémonie for the 2012 César awards has fallen to a man whose charm and wit will be familiar to many Irish viewers. Antoine de Caunes’s cheeky smile and Gallic turn of phrase first burst onto Irish screens circa 1989 when the BBC weekly programme “Rapido” was first aired on Network 2.
At that point, he was already a household name in France, having started out presenting rock shows in the late 1970s and having found huge national success in presenting Canal+’s light-hearted studio/sketch show “Nulle Part Ailleurs”. After Rapido came to an end in the early 1990s, de Caunes was to team up with similarly left-of-field designer Jean-Paul Gaultier to present the altogether more wacky and racy weekly show “Eurotrash” for British station Channel 4.Today, the youthful 58-year-old is more immersed in the world of cinema than that of television and has acted in numerous films as well as directing two of his own feature films.