Sara Martins

Sara Martins is a Portuguese-born French actress of Cape Verdean descent. Sara was born in Faro, in the Portuguese region of Algarve. She moved to France at the age of three. She learned English through U2 lyrics as a teenager.

She is known in France for her roles on television and in film and theatre. She appeared in over 70 films and television series, and her best role may be the Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey in the joint British-French long lasting crime series Death in Paradise (2011-) filmed in Guadeloupe, a French overseas department.

In her youth, she studied ballet and was the first person of African descent to join the Lyon Opera. She learned that she would be unable to advance to the Paris Opera, where the corps was expected to look alike, and there were no other black dancers.

In 1995, the playwright and director Roger Planchon hired her for his play Le Radeau de la Méduse at the Théâtre national populaire de Villeurbanne. Meanwhile, she continued studying law by correspondence until obtaining her Diplôme d'études universitaires générales (DEUG) in Law, a two-year undergraduate national diploma equivalent to a Baccalaureate.

At age 20, she studied at the theater school Les Enfants Terribles, in Paris. Then, she completed a three-year acting degree at the extremely selective Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique, the French National Academy of Dramatic Arts.