His career began with ten years spent acting in live theatre, playing roles drawn from works of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Jean Anouilh.

It was in 1957 that Cremer had his first credited part in a film, Quand la femme s'en mêle (When a woman meddles), which starred Alain Delon.

However, it was in 1965 that Cremer's career really began to prosper, with the film La 317e section, (The 317th Platoon), directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer and set in Indochina during the French colonial wars.

Examples from various points in his career include Section spéciale (1975), La légion saute sur Kolwezi (1980) and Là-haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages (2004).

The 1976 release The Good and the Bad (French Le Bon et les Méchants) was directed by Claude Lelouch, with Cremer playing Inspector Bruno Deschamps.

During this period his cinema film commitments were few, though he did appear in 2000 with Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand, written and directed by François Ozon, in 2001 in José Giovanni's Mon père, il m'a sauvé la vie, and in 2004 in Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Là-haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages (Above the Clouds).

A lifelong smoker of Punch brand cigars, he died of a cancer of the tongue and the pharynx from which he had suffered for several years,[2][3][4] in a Paris hospital on Saturday, 7 August 2010, aged 80.