Louis De Funes

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Louis Germain David de Funès de Galarza (31 July 1914 – 27 January 1983) was a French actor and comedian.

According to several polls conducted since 1968, he is France's favourite actor – having played over 130 roles in film and over 100 on stage.

His acting style is remembered for its high-energy performance and his wide range of facial expressions and tics.

A considerable part of his best-known acting was directed by Jean Girault. He often still is a household name in many countries such as Italy, Greece, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belgium, Serbia, Poland, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Albania, Romania, Croatia, former countries of the Soviet Union, as well as Iran.

Yet he remains almost unknown in the English-speaking world.

He was exposed to a wider audience only once in the United States, in 1974, with the release of The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

Early life

Louis de Funès was born on 31 July 1914 in Courbevoie, Hauts-de-Seine to parents who hailed from Seville, Spain. Since the couple's families opposed their marriage, they eloped to France in 1904. His father, Carlos Luis de Funès de Galarza, a nobleman whose mother descended from the Counts de Galarza (of Basque origin). His father was from Funes. He had been a lawyer in Spain, but became a diamond cutter upon arriving in France. His mother, Leonor Soto Reguera, was Galician, daughter to Galician lawyer Teolindo Soto Barro, of Portuguese descent.

Known to friends and intimates as "Fufu", de Funès spoke French, Spanish and English. During his youth, he was fond of drawing and playing the piano. He was an alumnus of the lycée Condorcet in Paris. He later dropped out, and his early life was rather inconspicuous; as a youth and young adult, de Funès held menial jobs, from which he was repeatedly fired. He became a bar pianist, working mostly as a jazz pianist in Pigalle, Paris, where he made his customers laugh each time he grimaced. He studied acting for one year at the Simon acting school, where he made some useful contacts, including with Daniel Gélin, among others. In 1936, he married Germaine Louise Elodie Carroyer, with whom he had one child: a son named Daniel; the couple divorced in late 1942. Through the early 1940s, de Funès continued playing the piano in clubs, thinking there was not much call for a short, balding, skinny actor. His wife and Daniel Gélin encouraged him until he managed to overcome his fear of rejection. His wife supported him in the most difficult moments and helped him to manage his career efficiently.

During the occupation of Paris in the Second World War, he continued his piano studies at a music school, where he fell in love with a secretary, Jeanne Barthelémy de Maupassant. She had fallen in love with "the young man who played jazz like God"; they married in 1943 and remained together for forty years until de Funès' death in 1983. They had two sons: Patrick (born on 27 January 1944), who became a doctor, and Olivier (born on 11 August 1949), who became a pilot for Air France Europe and also followed in his father's footsteps by becoming an actor. Olivier de Funès became known for the roles he played in some of his father's films (Les Grandes Vacances, Fantômas se déchaîne, Le Grand Restaurant and Hibernatus being the most famous).

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Theatrical career

De Funès began his show business career in the theatre, where he enjoyed modest success and appeared in small roles in films. Even after he rose to fame as a film actor, he continued to appear in theatres. His stage career culminated in a superb appearance in the play Oscar, a role he would reprise a few years later in the film version.

Film career

De Funès made his film debut at the age of 31 with a small part in Jean Stelli's La Tentation de Barbizon in 1945, thanks to his friendship with Daniel Gélin. In the role of the porter of Le Paradis, he appears on screen for less than 40 seconds, welcoming the character played by Jérôme Chambon in the foyer and pointing him to the double doors leading to the main room. ("It's this way, Sir") Chambon declines the invitation, instead of opening the door, pushing it open. "Bien, il a son compte qui là," De Funès says later.

("Well, he had enough, today!

"" is a big word that comes from the movie "British Poirier" was the title of an article.

He went on to appear in 130 film roles over the next 20 years, appearing in minor roles in over 80 films before being asked to perform in his first leading roles. de Funès maintained a regular schedule of professional duties during this period: during the morning, he did dubbing for well-known artists, such as Tot, an Italian comedy of the time; during the afternoon, he did film work; and in the evening, he performed as a dramatic actor.

He appeared in 50 films from 1945 to 1955, most as an extra or walk-on. In 1954, he went on to appear in such films as Ah! Les belles bacchantes et Le Mouton à cinq pattes. In 1956, he appeared in Claude Autant-Lara's well-known World War II parody, La Traversée de Paris, for the black-market pork butcher Jambier (another minor role). With Jean Girault's film Poulic-Pouic, he achieved fame in 1963. In all of his sequel films, this well-known film guaranteed de Funès top billing. De Funès, a 49-year-old French immigrant, became a major international celebrity with the success of Le gendarme de Saint-Tropez. Director Jean Girault envisioned de Funès as the ideal actor to play the chemist, opportunistic, and sycophant gendarme; the first film would be a series of six.

In the 1965 film Le Corniaud, Gérard Oury's second collaboration produced a memorable pair of de Funès with Bourvil—another great comedian actor. The de Funès-Bourvil partnership's success in La Grande Vadrouille, one of France's most popular and largest-grossing film, attracted a viewer of 17.27 million. It's still his greatest triumph. In his film La Folie des grandeurs, Oury envisaged a sequel to the two comics, but Bourvil's death in 1970 brought de Funès and Yves Montand together in that film.

De Funès rose to the top comic actor in France eventually. He won France's most popular movies seven times between 1964 and 1979. All three of his films were in the top ten in France for the year, led by Le Petit Baigneur in 1968.

He co-starred with many of the best French actors of his time, including Jean Marais and Mylène Demongeot in the Fantomas trilogy, as well as Jean Gabin, Fernandel, Coluche, Annie Girardot, and Yves Montand. He collaborated with Jean Girault in the famous 'Gendarmes' series. In an abandonment from the Gendarme style, de Funès collaborated with Claude Zidi, who wrote for him a new character full of nuance and frankness in L'aile ou la cuisse (1976), which is obviously the best of his roles. In films including Le Corniaud and Le Grand Restaurant, de Funès' formidable musical abilities were later demonstrated. He debuted in the first of the Fantômas series in 1964, launching him to superstardom.

Oury returned to de Funès in 1975 for a film titled Le Crocodile, in which he would play a South American tyrant. In March 1975, de Funès was hospitalized for heart problems and then forced to take a break from acting, causing Le Crocodile's cancellation. In L'Aile ou la cuisse, he appeared opposite Coluche, another comeback artist. De Funès fulfilled a long-awaited ambition to film a film adaptation of Molière's L'Avare in 1980.

In 1982, De Funès directed Le Gendarme et les gendarmettes, his last film.

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