The French actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz is in a “worrying” condition after a motorbike accident in greater Paris on Sunday, authorities say.
The 56-year-old, who is best known for his 1995 film La Haine and his role in the 2001 film Amélie, was on a motorcycle training course at the time, a police source told Agence France-Presse.
French media reported he was preparing for a role in an upcoming film when he was “very seriously injured”, including having head trauma and a fractured pelvis.
One of his daughters was on a motorcycle behind him with an instructor, and witnessed the accident, Le Parisien reported.
Kassovitz was taken to hospital in Kremlin-Bicêtre, according to authorities in Essonne, south of the French capital.
In 2019, Kassovitz told a motoring programme on French TV of his love of motorbikes. He said he had seen himself “more as an intellectual than a sportsman” but had developed a passion for motorbikes late in life, getting his licence aged 40 and immediately using big bikes.
He told the programme on RMC Découverte: “I like machines, I like the technicality of managing to handle them.”
Kassovitz wrote and directed La Haine when he was 27. The film follows three men – played by Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd Taghmaoui – over 24 hours after a riot in Paris and won Kassovitz the best director prize at Cannes film festival. It also won the César for best film, in France’s equivalent of the Oscars.
Kassovitz has starred as the love interest Nino in Amélie, a Mossad explosives expert in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and more recently as the lead in the French spy thriller series The Bureau, which has been a hit around the world.
In his most recent film, Visions, he plays the husband of Diane Kruger, who stars as an airline pilot who begins to have an affair with her ex-girlfriend. The film premiered at the Angoulême Francophone film festival two weeks ago.