At the age of 72, the French actor Tchéky Karyo, known from the movie Brutal Nikita and the series Missing, died. This was reported by the AFP agency on Friday evening with reference to his agent Elisabeth Tanner. His family said in a statement that he had been battling cancer.
From his native Istanbul, the son of a Greek mother and a Turkish father headed to the French screen in his thirties and scored his first major success with audiences in the late 1980s with the film Bears, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, in which he played a beast hunter overcome by compassion.
In the following decade, perhaps his best-known film role came as the agent-recruiter Bob, who in Luc Besson’s film convinces the young drug addict Nikita, played by Anne Parillaud, to kill on contract for the Secret Service.
In 1983, the actor with a piercing gaze was nominated for a César Award for Young Film Hope for playing the role of a gangster in Bob Swain’s film The Whacker, writes AFP.
His later well-known films include Jan Kounen’s film Dobrman, where he played a violent policeman, another Besson film Joan of Arc or a film about the friendship between a little boy and a dog Bella and Sebastián.
At the end of his career, he focused more on serial production. He tried the television format, for example, in the American-British crime series Missing, which premiered for three seasons between 2014 and 2016.
