Actor who supports Polanski booed

Protesters booed a French star who has condemned attacks on the controversial film director Roman Polanski as an “abominable public lynching” as he performed on stage.

The group whistled and shouted slogans as actor Lambert Wilson, who plays Merovingian in The Matrix films, gave a concert of Kurt Weill songs in the northern French city of Lille late on Wednesday.

“Polanski rapes and Wilson endorses it!” they shouted after the actor criticised actress Adele Haenel for walking out of the “French Oscars”, the Cesars, on Saturday after Polanski won best director.

Haenel was subjected to an ugly attack on Facebook earlier this week from the French casting director of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

Olivier Carbone said she and her supporters were “fat whores who behaved like hyenas with Polanski”, before later amending his post to drop the “w” word.

Polanski, wanted in the US since 1978 for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, sparked fury when he got 12 nominations for his historical drama An Officer and a Spy.

A call for a boycott of the movie did not stop it becoming a box office hit in France after it won two of the top prizes at the Venice film festival in September.

Haenel, who shook the French film industry last year by accusing the director of her first film, Christophe Ruggia, of sexually harassing her when she was only 12, stormed out of the Cesars ceremony when Polanski won the third of the three awards for his movie about the Dreyfus affair.