Gilbert Melki

Origins and early life

Gilbert Melki was born in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris on 12 November 1958. His father Prosper came from a Sephardi family of Khenchela in eastern Algeria and reached Paris in 1936; his mother Andrée was born in France of Turkish Jewish descent.

Work and career

Both had to hide during the German occupation, his father in Lyon and his mother in Normandy, and the family that emerged from it was the ordinary Jewish Paris of the eastern arrondissements, which he has said he carries into every part he plays. He worked as a market trader and a bus driver before coming to acting late, made his screen debut in Claude Chabrol's Betty in 1992, and became a household name in 1997 as Patrick Abitbol, the boastful, generous garment-trade dealer of La Vérité si je mens!, a comedy about the Sentier rag trade that gave French Sephardi life its first affectionate mass-audience portrait and produced two sequels.

He also worked in a very different register with François Dupeyron in Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran, with Anne Fontaine, and with Claude Miller. Television made him Jacky in Kaboul Kitchen, for which he was named best actor in a French series at Séries Mania in 2012.