Tchéky Karyo, the French actor who co-starred in Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, toplined the TV series Baptiste and had more than 100 other film and television credits during a 40-year screen career, died Friday of cancer. He was 72.
His wife, actor Valérie Keruzoré, and their children announced his death to the French news agency AFP.
Born on October 4, 1953, in Instanbul, Karyo moved with his family to France at a young age. He was nearly 30 when he began to land roles in film and was nominated for a César Award as Most Promising Actor for one of his earliest movies, La balance (1982).
He began working steadily through the 1980s, and his big break came in 1990, when writer-director Besson cast him in the key role of Bob, a member of a secret government entity who mentors Nikita (Anne Pariillaud) as she transforms into a trained killer.
From there, Karyo would take on mostly supporting movie roles in dozens of 1990s movies ranging from Besson’s Joan of Arc, Michael Bay’s Bad Boys, Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise and the Pierce Brosnan James Bond pic GoldenEye to Addicted to Love, Babel and Besson’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.
As the millennium turned, Karyo continued to work consistently in films into the first half of the 2010s, appearing in Pieces of Me, Requiem for a Killer, A Man and His Dog and many more. Along the way, he began to take gigs in French TV series including Section Zero and No Limit. Among his most famous was playing Detective Julien Baptiste in the British series The Missing, for which he was nominated as Outstanding Actor in a Miniseries at the 2015 Monte-Carlo TV Festival. The show aired on BBC One in the UK and Starz in the U.S.
From there Karyo focused mainly on television. He appeared in several episodes of War on Beasts, The Name of the Rose and ZeroZeroZero before landing a lead in his own series. He reprised his role from The Missing in spinoff Baptiste, a 2019-21 crime drama that aired on BBC One.
Karyo continue to grace the big and small screens right up until his final role in the 2025 film Faster.
