Tchéky Karyo

Origins and early life

Tchéky Karyo was born Baruh Djaki Karyo in Istanbul on 4 October 1953, into a family of Sephardi Jews whose ancestors had fled the Spanish Inquisition and settled in Turkey centuries earlier; his father was Turkish, a lorry driver who became a tailor in Paris, his mother Greek.

Work and career

The family came to France when he was a child, and he trained at the Cyrano theatre school and worked for years on stage with the Théâtre national de Strasbourg before the cinema found him. Jean-Jacques Annaud's L'Ours in 1988 and Luc Besson's Nikita in 1990, in which he played the handler who makes an assassin of Anne Parillaud, made him one of the faces of French cinema of that decade. Hollywood used him as it uses European actors, for menace and gravity: he was in The Patriot opposite Mel Gibson, in Bad Boys, in GoldenEye, and in Le Baiser mortel du dragon with Jet Li in 2001.

A late and much wider popularity came with the three Belle et Sébastien films from 2013 to 2018, where he played the grandfather, and with the series The Missing. He recorded albums of his own songs, and died of cancer at Quimper on 31 October 2025, at seventy-two.