Tchéky Karyo, the Turkish-born French actor who sparkled as a detective on the harrowing BBC series The Missing and had solid supporting turns in films including La Femme Nikita, Addicted to Love and Bad Boys, has died. He was 72.
Karyo died Friday after a battle with cancer, his family told the AFP news service.
Karyo also portrayed Martín Alonso Pinzón, the shipbuilder who sailed with Gérard Depardieu’s Christopher Columbus, in Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and he was the French Major Jean Villeneuve opposite Mel Gibson in The Patriot (2000).
And in the Griffin Dunne-directed romantic comedy Addicted to Love (1997), he played the French restaurant owner named Anton who is at the center of a scheme hatched by Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan’s characters.
Over four decades, the charismatic Karyo carved out a career as “the quintessential French sex symbol — strong, handsome, softly spoken and given to philosophy, art and yoga,” The Times of London noted in a 2014 piece.
Karyo stood out as the government handler known as “Uncle Bob” for Luc Besson in La Femme Nikita (1989), then reteamed with his countryman for the films The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) and Kiss of the Dragon (2001) and for the Belgian-French spy series No Limit in 2013.
As the heroic French detective Julien Baptiste, Karyo searched for kids who had disappeared during two eight-episode seasons of the Amsterdam-set The Missing in 2014 and 2016. He returned for sibling series creators Harry and Jack Williams as the now-reluctant character on the 2019 spinoff Baptiste.
“For me it’s a treat, it’s a gift, I’m glad to come back,” he said in an interview, “especially when you realize how [beloved Baptiste is] with the audience. It’s like a big embrace, and I’m glad to give back every time I’m called.”
Tchéky Karyo with Kelly Preston in 1997’s Addicted to Love.
Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection
Karyo was born on Oct. 4, 1953, in Istanbul, the son of a Turkish delivery man and builder, and raised in Paris. When his parents separated when he was 13, his mother ordered him to leave the house as well. “She put me out,” he said. “It was terrible. My world was breaking.”
With dreams of becoming a French Laurence Olivier, he acted at the National Theatre of Strasbourg, then played a disturbed henchman in one of his first films, La Balance (1982), receiving a César Award for “best male revelation.”
He scored leading roles in such French films as Eric Rohmer’s Full Moon in Paris (1984), Sorceress (1987), The Bear (1988) and Vincent and Me (1990), where he starred as Vincent Van Gogh.
In 1994, he played the titular prophet in Nostradamus and a year later was the French drug kingpin Fouchet in the first Bad Boys movie and another tough guy, Russian defense minister Dimitri Mishkin, in GoldenEye, the first outing for Pierce Brosnan as James Bond.
His big-screen résumé also included Australia (1989), Operation Dumbo Drop (1995), Saving Grace (2000), The Core (2003), A Very Long Engagement (2004), Taking Lives (2004), A Previous Engagement (2008), The Way (2010), Les Lyonnais (2011), Daydreams (2016) and The Killer (2024).
He also was a musician and songwriter who released the albums Ce lien qui nous unit and Credo in 2006 and 2013, respectively.
Survivors include his second wife, actress Valérie Keruzoré, whom he married in 2002, and their children, Louise and Liv.
