André Wilms
Born into an Alsatian family far removed from the theatrical world, André Wilms, after a CAP in stucco work, started out as a bender at the Sorano theater , then home to Grenier de Toulouse, founded by Maurice Sarrazin. He was soon hired as an extra. Then a Maoist activist with the Gauche prolétarienne, he auditioned for Klaus Michael Grüber, who had directed him in Faust/Salpêtrière.
After being cast in Baal by Bertolt Brecht directed by André Engel, Engel offered him a place in other plays: En attendant Godot by Samuel Beckett, Hôtel moderne by Franz Kafka, La Nuit des chasseurs by Woyzeck by Georg Büchner. He joins the newly-created Théâtre national de Strasbourg, directed by Jean-Pierre Vincent.
His collaboration with Grüber continued with Büchner's La Mort de Danton and Nabokov's Le Pôle.) He went on to work with Deborah Warner(La Maison de poupée) and Michel Deutsch(Imprécation II, IV and XXXVI, in 1993, 1995 and 1999 respectively), or Heiner Goebbels (Max Black in 1998, Eraritjaritjakaen2004).
He was one of the first supporters of Heiner Müller in France.
On the silver screen, he has appeared in some 50 films, including several for Aki Kaurismäki (La Vie de bohème, Le Havre) or Étienne Chatiliez (La vie est un long fleuve tranquille, TatieDanielle, Tanguy, La confiance règne), as well as for Amos Gitaï(Roses on Credit) or Valeria Bruni Tedeschi(Un château en Italie).
In the late 1980s, André Wilms began directing his own plays and operas; his productions include La Conférence des oiseaux by Michaël Levinas (Festival International de Montpellier, 1988), Le Château de Barbe-Bleue by Béla Bartók (Festival International de Montpellier, 1990), La Philosophie dans le boudoir by Marquis de Sade (Munich, Marstall, 1997), Pulsion by F. X. Kroetz (Théâtre de la Colline, 1999), La Noce chez les petits bourgeois by Bertolt Brecht (Munich, 2000), La Vie de bohème after Henry Murger and Aki Kaurismaki (Stadttheater Frankfurt, 2001), Histoires de famille from Biljana Srbljanović (Théâtre national populaire - Villeurbanne, Théâtre national de la Colline, 2002), Les Bacchantes from Euripides (Comédie-Française).
In February 2019, he appeared in La Fin de l'homme rouge, a show created by Emmanuel Meirieu based on the novel by Svetlana Alexievitch, at the Théâtre des Gémeaux in Sceaux.
