Stanislas Merhar is a French actor born in 1971. After studying piano for five years at l’École Normale de Musique de Paris, Stanislas Merhar began to study the art of gilding.
In 1997, he stood out in a casting organized by Anne Fontaine for Nettoyage à sec and the filmmaker subsequently offered him a role in the film. His performance, alongside Miou-Miou and Charles Berling, won him a César Award for Most Promising Actor in 1998. In that same year, he is part of a prestigious cast including Gérard Depardieu, Ornella Muti, Jean Rochefort and Pierre Arditi, in the television series Count of Monte-Cristo, by Josée Dayan, a director with whom he would work again in 2001 in the film Zaïde, un petit air de vengeance.
A fan of auteur cinema, the actor who dreams of being directed by Maurice Pialat instead collaborates with Manoel de Oliveira (A Carta, 1999), Jean-Claude Brisseau (Les savates du bon Dieu, 2000) and Chantal Akerman (Le Captive, 2000).
The lead actor in Furia by Alexandre Aja, he also shoots in Italy, for Pupi Avati (I cavalieri che fecero l'impresa, 2001) and for Fabio Carpi (Nobel, 2001). Back in France, he plays the part of Adolphe (2002) by Benoît Jacquot, and is a part of two films by Michel Deville: Un monde presque paisible and Un fil à la patte.
After a few collaborations with young directors, such as Andrew Litvack, Jean-Henri Roger, Dominique Lienhard, Valérie Mréjen and Bertrand Schefer, Stanislas returns to his work with Chantal Akerman, in 2011, as the protagonist of Almayer’s Folly. Recently he was one of the protagonists of Philippe Garrel’s film In the Shadow of Women (2015).