Rampling wins Euro film award

Charlotte Rampling was named best actress tonight at the European Film Awards in Berlin.

The star won for her role in the Anglo-French film Swimming Pool.

She plays a prim English novelist getting away from it all at her publisher’s villa in the south of France, only to find her peace interrupted by the arrival of the publisher’s feisty teenage daughter.

The 58-year-old actress is best known for her role as a concentration camp survivor reunited with the Nazi guard who tortured her in 1974 film The Night Porter.

Rampling was educated in England and France and has divided her acting career between Britain, the US and continental Europe.

She triumphed tonight in a short-list which recognised veteran female talent.

Dame Helen Mirren, 58, was nominated for Calendar Girls and Anne Reid, 68, for her role in The Mother, in which she plays a widow who begins an affair with her daughter’s young lover.