Daniel Emilfork

Origins and early life

Daniel Emilfork was born at Providencia, in Chile, on 7 April 1924, to Jewish immigrants from Odessa who had left for South America after a pogrom; his mother was Elena Berenstein. He grew up in a Spanish-speaking country in a Yiddish-speaking family and came to France in 1949 to study the theatre, keeping all his life an accent that no one could place and a face that no one forgot.

Work and career

He worked with the great stage directors of the French theatre, Patrice Chéreau among them, and became one of those actors whose physical strangeness is a resource: gaunt, angular, with a voice out of another century. Federico Fellini cast him in Il Casanova in 1976; French television made him the villain of the series Chéri-Bibi in 1974; and Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet gave him in 1995 the part he is remembered for outside France, Krank in La Cité des enfants perdus, the man who cannot dream and steals children's dreams.

He married the actress Denise Péron in 1951 and their daughter Stéphanie became an actress and director; from the 1980s he lived with the actor Frédéric Leidgens. He died in Paris on 17 October 2006, at eighty-two.