Tchéky Karyo, "GoldenEye" and "The Missing "star, dies at 72 Wesley StenzelNovember 1, 2025 at 11:12 PM 0 LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Tchéky Karyo in July 2022 Tchéky Karyo, the character actor who starred in Goldeneye and played the lead detective on the series The Missing, has died. The Turkishborn French actor died Friday following a battle with cancer, his family told news agency the Agence France=Presse. "He was a wonderful actor and man," Karyo's American agent, Dallas Smith, told Entertainment Weekly on Saturday.
- - Tchéky Karyo, "GoldenEye" and "The Missing "star, dies at 72
Wesley StenzelNovember 1, 2025 at 11:12 PM
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LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty
Tchéky Karyo in July 2022
Tchéky Karyo, the character actor who starred in Goldeneye and played the lead detective on the series The Missing, has died.
The Turkish-born French actor died Friday following a battle with cancer, his family told news agency the Agence France=Presse.
"He was a wonderful actor and man," Karyo's American agent, Dallas Smith, told Entertainment Weekly on Saturday. "The world is a poorer place without him — we will never see the like again."
Karyo's French agent did not immediately respond to EW's request for comment.
ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AFP via Getty
Tchéky Karyo promoting 'Kiss of the Dragon' at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001
Born in Istanbul in 1953 to Jewish parents hailing from Greece and Turkey, Karyo moved to Paris as a child, where he studied the dramatic arts at the Cyrano Theatre. He performed in a number of stage productions at the National Theatre of Strasbourg before launching his four-decade screen career with the 1982 film The Return of Martin Guerre. That same year, he won a César Award, the French equivalent to an Oscar, for Most Promising Actor for the crime film The Balance.
After landing a handful of smaller supporting parts, Karyo played major roles in 1980s French films like Eric Rohmer's romance Full Moon in Paris and Jean-Jacques Annaud's family adventure The Bear. He found further international success in Luc Besson's 1990 thriller Nikita, released as La Femme Nikita in the U.S., portraying Bob, the mentor of Anne Parillaud's titular assassin. That same year, he played Vincent Van Gogh in Vincent and Me.
United Artists
Tchéky Karyo in 'GoldenEye'
Karyo's next decade was dominated by English-language projects, beginning with 1991's Exposure, from Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles. He starred alongside Gérard Depardieu in Ridley Scott's 1992 Christopher Columbus epic 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and played the titular astronomer in the 1994 biopic Nostradamus.
The actor played supporting roles in two major action films in 1995. He portrayed the Russian defense minister Dmitri Mishkin in GoldenEye, which marked Pierce Brosnan's first outing as James Bond in the movie franchise, and also played the villainous drug kingpin Fouchet in Bad Boys opposite Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
His other major English-language projects in the '90s included Griffin Dunne's rom-com Addicted to Love with Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick; Simon Wincer's war comedy Operation Dumbo Drop with Danny Glover and Ray Liotta; and Besson's historical The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, starring Milla Jovovich as the titular martyr. He also worked alongside Tom Hanks and Ron Howard on the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, portraying cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès.
Karyo's best-known French project of the '90s after Nikita was the spoof film La Cité de la peur, in which he played a projectionist who is murdered while screening a slasher movie at Cannes. He also reunited with Salles on the Portuguese-language drama Foreign Land.
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty
Tchéky Karyo at the Monte Carlo TV Festival in June 2021
Karyo played Mel Gibson's ally in Roland Emmerich's American Revolution drama The Patriot in 2000, and appeared alongside Jet Li and Bridget Fonda in the 2001 actioner Kiss of the Dragon. In 2003, he played a supporting role in the disaster movie The Core opposite Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank, and acted with Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke in the psychological thriller Taking Lives the following year.
Karyo also appeared in a number of French historical dramas in the 2000s, including the Jean-Baptiste Lully biopic The King Dances, in which he played Molière; The Accursed Kings miniseries, in which he portrayed King Philip IV; and the World War I drama A Very Long Engagement, which received two Oscar nominations.
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The last chapter of Karyo's career featured more TV projects, most notably the BBC and Starz mystery The Missing, in which he played Julien Baptiste, the lead detective searching for a missing child. He reprised the role in a second season of the show and also on the spinoff Baptiste, which ran for two seasons and ended in 2021.
Jules Heath/Starz
Tchéky Karyo in 'The Missing'
Karyo also played Pope John XXII in the miniseries The Name of the Rose and appeared on the Italian crime series ZeroZeroZero. He played a supporting role in the Apple TV+ series Liaison and portrayed a general in the French World War I series Women at War.
Throughout the 2010s, Karyo acted in the Belle and Sebastian trilogy of French historical adventure films and appeared in John Woo's English-language remake of The Killer. His most recent film project was the French movie Faster, released earlier this year.
Karyo is survived by his wife, Valérie Keruzoré, and their two children.
on Entertainment Weekly
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Source: Entertainment
Published: November 01, 2025 at 07:00PM on Source: COSMOPOLITE
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