Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay win Berlin acting prizes for 45 Years

Charlotte Rampling accepts her best actress award for 45 Years at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival

Congratulations to British actors Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, who have won the best actress and best actor award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival for their roles in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years. In this eagerly awaited new drama from the director of the acclaimed gay romance Weekend (2011), the duo play an ageing couple whose marriage is tested on the cusp of their 45th anniversary after Geoff (Courtenay) receives unexpected news about a long-dead lover.

Backed by the BFI Film Fund, 45 Years has been warmly received by critics, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calling it “a moving and absorbing drama featuring two performers offering a lifetime’s wisdom and technique in their performances.”

Of Rampling, the Telegraph’s Tim Robey wrote: “She’s rarely been better than she is here, in the role of a placid, dog-walking, tea-drinking middle-class Brit, who finds the floor abruptly falling out beneath her.” He also singled out Courtenay, writing that he “has a perceptive, oddly feminine, and brilliantly specific way with monologues, seeming to juggle in his head what needs to be said and perhaps, even more urgently, needs not to be.”

Berlin’s prizes were announced on 14 February, with the Golden Bear going to Jafar Panahi’s Taxi and Pablo Larrain taking the Grand Jury Prize for The Club. The jury president was director Darren Aronofsky.

• Read Sight & Sound’s reaction to the winners