Name	Simon Abkarian
Height
Naionality	French-American
Date of Birth	5-March-1962
Place of Birth	Gonesse, Val d'Oise, France
Famous for	Acting

Simon Abkarian is a French-Armenian actor. Born in Gonesse, Val d'Oise, of Armenian descent, Abkarian spent his childhood in Lebanon. He moved to Los Angeles, where he joined an Armenian theater company managed by Gerald Papazian. He returned to France in 1985, settling in Paris. He took classes at the Acting International school, then he joined Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil and played, among others, in L'Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge ("The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia") by Hélène Cixous, and in the House of Atreus four-play cycle by Aeschylus.

The New York Times critic John Rockwell wrote on 27 March 1991: "But the star of this cycle is Simon Abkarian. Mr. Abkarian takes on Agamemnon, Achilles, a chorus leader, a Messenger, Orestes and, as an almost giddy bonus, Orestes' aged Nurse. These are parts with a huge range, and Mr. Abkarian was master of them all. But the climax of "The Libation Bearers" -- Orestes crazed with madness as the Furies crow in vengeful triumph, trying to taunt the corpses of his mother and her lover back to life so he can kill them again, drenched in blood and reeling with madness—found Mr. Abkarian almost unbearably intense". His first roles in cinema were proposed by French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch, who asked him to play in several of his movies, notably in Chacun cherche son chat ("When the Cat is Away" (1996) and in Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire) in 2003. He was featured in Sally Potter's Yes (2004), in which he played the lead role. Karen Durbin wrote in the New York Times on 8 May 2005: "With his long, elegant body and lined, tragicomic face -- mournful eyes, a delicious smile under a canopy of dark mustache and a nose just short of Cyrano's, Mr. Abkarian is a visual feast. He's seldom still, his expressive features shifting from sad to sexy to sharply observant, and his loose-limbed body moving for the sheer pleasure of it".

He has also been the voice of Ebi in the French version of the animated feature Persepolis. Abkarian played the role of the Armenian poet Missak Manouchian in The Army of Crime (2010) by Robert Guédiguian, a French filmmaker based in Marseilles, who is also of Armenian parentage. He has also played Dariush Bakhshi, the Iranian Special Consul, in the BBC drama Spooks (MI-5). In 2012, he played the role of a drug-dealing Afghan army colonel in the Canal+ series Kaboul Kitchen.