Alain Chabat Biography

CIVIL STATUS
Careers Actor, Producer, Screenwriter more
Nationalities French Algerian
Born 24 November 1958 (Oran – Algeria)
BIOGRAPHY
After a difficult schooling, Alain Chabat, a member of the Nuls collective, was consecrated in 1994 with La Cité de la peur. From then on, he pursued a solo career. He played a macho and unfaithful husband in Josiane Balasko’s Cursed Turf (1994) before directing his first feature film in 1996, Didier, in which he portrayed himself in the role of… labrador! Winner of the César Award for Best First Film, Alain Chabat created his own production company, Chez Wam, and then returned to the camera, starring in the crime film Le Cousin (1997) and the comedy-drama Le Goût des autres (2000). He even tried his hand at animation by dubbing the green ogre in the triumphant Shrek saga.

In 2002, Alain Chabat wrote the screenplay and directed Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra. With more than 14 million admissions, the film is one of the biggest successes at the French box office. Chabat’s popularity was enormous: he was asked by the Robin Hoods to direct the prehistoric comedy RRRrrrr !! (2004), played alongside Gad Elmaleh (Chouchou, 2003) and Yvan Attal (They Married and Had Many Children, 2004), and found himself in front of the camera of the “Robin” Maurice Barthélémy, who offered him the bittersweet and emotional role of his Papa in 2005. The same year, he brilliantly played the macho and obsessed superior of Gael Garcia Bernal in The Science of Dreams by the Frenchy Michel Gondry.

The ex-Nul, who has become one of the most powerful and popular personalities in French cinema, plays a hardened bachelor in Prête-moi ta main, a box-office hit in 2006, a nerdy singer in the offbeat comedy La Personne aux deux personnes, and also co-wrote the adaptation of Le Petit Nicolas. Devoting himself more and more to his activities as a producer (Un monde à nous, Ensemble c’est trop in 2010) and to his international career (La Nuit au musée 2, A Thousand Words with Eddie Murphy in 2010), he nevertheless agreed to play the lead role in Trésor (2009), a canine comedy by his old friend Claude Berri (producer of Didier), which disappears a few days after the start of filming.

He returned in 2011 in the new adaptation of War of the Buttons, directed by Yann Samuell. But his big return to the front of the stage came the following year with his new film, which he had been maturing for more than 10 years, and for which he was also an actor, screenwriter and producer: Sur la piste du Marsupilami, a big-budget adaptation of André Franquin’s character, marking at the same time his reunion with Jamel Debbouze.

After returning to animation by lending his voice to the character of Salis in Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), the actor joined the cast of Les Gamins in 2013, where he played Gilbert, victim of an existential crisis, alongside Max Boublil. In 2014, the man who restored the saga’s image with Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, lends her voice to Senator Prospectus in Asterix: The Domain of the Gods, by Alexandre Astier. He then starred in Quentin Dupieux’s new film, Réalité, in which he played Jason, a cameraman, who, in order to make his first horror film, had to find the best moan in the history of cinema.

In 2017, after taking part in Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in the guise of Bob the Pirate, Chabat delivered his fifth feature film, the comedy Santa & Cie, in which he played none other than Santa Claus. In 2020, he reunited with Boublil for the original Play and played a country restaurant owner who decides to go looking for love in Korea in the romantic comedy #Jesuislà by Eric Lartigau (La Famille Bélier). Duke of Aquitaine in the lucrative Kaamelott – The first part, the actor then filmed twice under the direction of someone he knew well in the person of Quentin Dupieux (Unbelievable but true and Smoking makes you cough).