Dany Boon

Dany Boon was born Daniel Farid Hamidou in the north of France, to a Muslim father from Issers in Algeria, a boxer and a chauffeur, and a Catholic mother from the Nord; he studied graphic art at the Institut Saint-Luc in Belgium and reached Paris in 1989, where he mimed in the street for a living and worked the open-mic nights. His one-man shows in the Ch'ti dialect of the Nord made him famous — one 2003 show sold six hundred thousand DVDs — and in 2008 Welcome to the Sticks, which he wrote, directed and starred in, became one of the biggest box-office successes in French history.

He has since written or directed Nothing to Declare, Supercondriaque, Raid dingue, La Ch'tite famille and Stuck Together, has acted for Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Danièle Thompson and Julie Delpy, and voices Olaf in the French version of Frozen. In 2002 he converted to Judaism, the faith of his wife Yaël Harris, with whom he has three children, and in 2016 he took a leading role in Yvan Attal's film about antisemitism in France.