Jacques Haïk

Jacques Haïk was born in Tunis on 20 June 1893, the son of a rabbi and the youngest of fourteen children, and the French Wikipedia article calls him plainly a French-protected Jew. His father died in 1902 and his mother sent the children to France to make their way; Jacques reached Paris and, at seventeen, took work as an interpreter at the Paris arm of a London company importing American films. By 1913 he ran it — and it was under him that Charlie Chaplin's films first came to France. Haïk invented the name the French have called the character ever since: Charlot. He built the great picture palaces: he rebuilt the Olympia entirely, opened Le Français in 1940, and in 1932 built Le Grand Rex, with 3,000 seats one of the largest cinemas in Europe and still open today. He produced some forty films and became one of France's three biggest producers, giving Annabella, Arletty and Jules Berry their first talking roles. Jewish and an anti-Nazi, he joined Free France in Tunis during the war and represented it in the Arab world.