André Charpak

Origins and early life

André Charpak was born at Sarny, then in Poland and today in Ukraine, on 4 September 1928, and died at Créteil on 23 June 2006. He was a son of Maurice Charpak, a merchant, and of Anna Chapiro, the Jewish family that left Polish Volhynia for France in 1931, and he was the younger brother of the physicist Georges Charpak, who was arrested by the Vichy police in 1943, deported to Dachau and awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1992.

He studied at the lycée Henri-IV in Paris and became an actor, a writer of screen dialogue, a screenwriter and a director, working in French cinema and television from the late 1950s to the 1980s.

Work and career

He appeared in films such as En bordée in 1958 and La Dame de pique in 1965 and in television series including Les Cinq Dernières Minutes. As a director he made the short film Mayeux le bossu in 1964, then La Vie normale in 1966, Le Crime de David Levinstein in 1967 and La Provocation in 1970. On the stage he adapted, directed and acted in works drawn from Dostoevsky and Balzac, and he was the uncle of the epidemiologist Yves Charpak.