Michel Galabru

Michel Galabru — Biography

French film and stage actor Michel Louis Edmond Galabru came into the world on 27 October 1922 in Safi, in the French protectorate of Morocco, and died in Paris on 4 January 2016. Over a career that stretched across nearly seventy years, his name appeared in the credits of more than two hundred and fifty films, and he came to be regarded as one of the most familiar faces of French comic cinema.

After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague in Paris, he entered the national conservatory of dramatic art and graduated with its first prize. From 1950 to 1957 he spent seven years as a member of the Comédie-Française company. The theatre remained a constant in his life: in later decades he took charge of the Théâtre Montmartre-Galabru and the Théâtre de Dix Heures and mounted productions of his own.

He first attracted attention on screen in Yves Robert's La Guerre des boutons, one of the box-office successes of 1962. Wider fame arrived in 1964 with Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez, in which, opposite Louis de Funès, he played Sergeant Major Gerber of the Saint-Tropez gendarmerie — a character he returned to in the five sequels of the series. Thereafter he was a fixture of French comedy, working repeatedly for directors including Jean Girault, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Georges Lautner, Bertrand Blier and Claude Zidi. Popular hits such as Le Viager, Le Grand Bazar, Flic ou Voyou, Papy fait de la résistance, La Cage aux folles and Les Sous-doués featured him prominently, and he was reunited with de Funès in L'Avare. Out of financial necessity he also lent his name to innumerable cheaply made comic pictures of little artistic merit.

His serious roles won comparable admiration, with L'Ibis rouge, Le Choix des armes, Subway, Kamikaze and Uranus all demonstrating this register of his talent. His portrayal of Joseph Bouvier, a nineteenth-century serial killer, in Bertrand Tavernier's Le Juge et l'Assassin earned him the César Award for Best Actor in 1977. Supporting-actor César nominations followed, for Subway in 1986 and for Uranus in 1991. In the final stretch of his career he turned up in pictures such as Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar, Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis and Le Petit Nicolas.

For the stage he moved between boulevard comedies and plays by Molière, Jean Anouilh and, above all, Marcel Pagnol, for whose writing he had a special fondness. The Molière for best actor went to him in 2008 for his performance in Les Chaussettes-Opus 124. He remained active almost to the very end, not least through Le Cancre, a one-man show that looked back on his career with self-deprecating humour. A Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters who was raised to Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit in 2013, Galabru was the son of Paul Galabru, the brother of Marc Galabru and the father of the actors Jean Galabru and Emmanuelle Galabru. He died in Paris on 4 January 2016, aged 93.