The daughter of actor Richard Bohringer, Romane Bohringer is recognized in her native France as an actress in her own right, rather than just as her famous father's offspring. She first came to the attention of critics and filmgoers alike in 1992 with starring roles in both L'Accompagnatrice (The Accompanist) and Cyril Collard's Les Nuits Fauves (Savage Nights). Bohringer earned raves for her performances in both films, but it was for her latter portrayal of Laura, a young woman caught up in an unstable relationship with an HIV-positive man (Collard), that made her known on both sides of the Atlantic. Bohringer won a Most Promising Young Actress César for her fearless, passionate performance, and she was touted as one of the most astonishing aspects of an altogether astonishing film.
Bohringer's subsequent career has been varied, with work in films both good (Le Colonel Chabert, 1994) and bad (Total Eclipse, 1995). She did particularly strong work in collaboration with director Martine Dugowson, starring in her acclaimed Mina Tannenbaum (1994) as a Jewish girl growing up in Paris, and Portraits Chinois (1996), which featured her as one of a group of Parisian friends dealing with the effects of precariously placed lust.
Equally at home in both comedies and dramas, Bohringer is frequently cast in films that require her to play young women who are either lovelorn or who cause others to suffer from the same condition. This has been the case with such films as L'Appartement (1996), in which she played a woman driven to desperate measures by unrequited love; La Femme De Chambre Du Titanic, in which she played the protagonist's unfaithful wife; and Quelque Chose d'Organique (1998), which cast her as a bored, adulterous young wife. In 1999, she returned to the realm of chaotic love as the wife of filmmaker Jean Vigo in Vigo: Passion for Life, a biopic of the legendary but tragically short-lived director.
