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The Missing, which ran for two series on BBC One in 2014 and 2016, carried echoes of famous cases of children who had vanished while on holiday. This tense thriller, its action scattered across multiple timelines, was expertly acted by a high-calibre cast of home-grown stalwarts, including Keeley Hawes, David Morrissey, James Nesbitt and Ken Stott.
It was a less familiar performer, the Turkish-born French actor Tchéky Karyo, who provided the main point of continuity between both series, as well as supplying their moral centre. As the dogged, philosophical detective Julien Baptiste, he is first seen tending to his bees and contemplating imminent retirement. That is, until a cold case from eight years earlier re-enters his life.
Nesbitt plays a man whose five-year-old son was snatched from the (fictional) French town of Châlons du Bois, and who has returned to the area after spotting his child’s distinctive scarf in a recent photograph taken there. Baptiste feigns scepticism, but is soon making his own inquiries. During the original investigation, he had declared: “Sadly, we find [the boy] immediately or not at all.” His tenacity lends the series its momentum, his wisdom and humanity its depth.
Karyo, who has died aged 72 of cancer, was no newcomer. He had been acting on screen since the early 1980s. His roles included an urban planner caught up in the romantic imbroglios of Eric Rohmer’s Full Moon in Paris (1984); a hunter, one of the few human characters in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Bear (1988); Bob, a recruiter and trainer of assassins, in Luc Besson’s stylish thriller La Femme Nikita (1990); and the Spanish mariner and explorer Martín Alonso Pinzón, who sails with Christopher Columbus, played by Gérard Depardieu, in Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992).
He also played the Russian defence minister in the James Bond adventure GoldenEye and made headway beyond Europe, appearing as the chief villain, a drugs kingpin, in the action-comedy Bad Boys (both 1995), where he had the distinction of being shot dead by Will Smith in the film’s climax. He starred as Mel Gibson’s second-in-command in The Patriot (2000), set during the American revolutionary war.
But even Nostradamus, whom Karyo played in a 1994 biopic, might not have foreseen the actor’s late-period renaissance as a beloved sleuth on British television.
It almost didn’t happen. When Karyo was first offered the role of Baptiste, he turned it down, considering the subject matter too dark for him to tackle only three months after the birth of his daughter. It was offered instead to the British actor Tom Wilkinson, only for Karyo to undergo a last-minute change of heart.
The character was loosely based on the real-life detective Jean-Francois Abgrall, author of the memoir Inside the Mind of a Killer, which detailed his pursuit of the serial killer Francis Heaulme. Baptiste inherited Abgrall’s patient, ruminative approach with suspects.
After having his leg slammed repeatedly in a car door by an adversary in the first series, Baptiste staggers through subsequent episodes with a limp, though Karyo confessed that he sometimes forgot which leg was the injured one.
Having hunted sex offenders, kidnappers and serial killers, Baptiste bows out at the end of the second series facing his mightiest foe yet: a brain tumour. As he lies on the operating table in the final scene, the anaesthetic takes longer to work than expected. “Perhaps you are made of stronger things,” he is told.
He lived to fight another day, returning for two series of his own spin-off, Baptiste, in 2019 and 2021, the first set in the Netherlands, the second in Hungary. The Telegraph said he “carries the series along on his charisma”. The show even turned him into a pin-up in his mid-60s. “I didn’t expect it,” he said. “It has made me feel young again.”
Viewers who knew Karyo only from that reassuring role might have been surprised to find that he previously specialised in rage. In the irreverent and cartoonishly violent Dobermann (1997), for instance, he gives law enforcement an uglier face as a cop who acts as savagely as the criminals he is pursuing: he throws a baby across a room, pistol whips the child’s mother, and gives the infant a grenade as a plaything. Karyo played another corrupt cop opposite the martial arts star Jet Li in Kiss of the Dragon (2001).
He was born Baruh Djaki Karyo (Tchéky is the phonetic pronunciation of his middle name) in Istanbul to a Greek mother and Turkish father, who was a delivery driver. He was raised in Paris. At 13, his parents separated, and his mother asked his father to take Karyo with him. “It was terrible,” he recalled. “My world was breaking.”
Later, however, he “started to appreciate that she had the guts to do it; in the period she lived in, a woman would never do that, but she stood against my father and said, ‘It’s enough. I need to find my way and this doesn’t work.’”
After being educated at lycée Arago, he began training to be an accountant before quitting to pursue acting, taking a series of menial jobs to support himself. He studied drama at the Cyrano theatre, then joined the Daniel Sorano company and the National Theatre of Strasbourg.
He had a small role in The Return of Martin Guerre but first made a splash as a gangster’s psychotic stooge in the thriller La Balance (both 1982) and as a bank robber in Andrzej Żuławski’s garish L’Amour Braque (1985), inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
Following the success of Bad Boys and GoldenEye, Karyo’s profile rose in English-language cinema. In John Hillcoat’s Vertigo-like melodrama To Have and To Hold (1996), he played a man remodelling his new lover (Rachel Griffiths) in the image of his former wife. The following year, he starred with Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan in the intriguingly sour romcom Addicted to Love, about two jilted lovers who spy on their exes; Karyo played Ryan’s former partner, a restaurateur who takes up with Broderick’s ex-girlfriend.
He also starred in the disaster movie The Core (2003) and with Nick Nolte in Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief (2002), and played the prophet Elisha in Mary Magdalene (2018) opposite Rooney Mara in the title role and Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus.
Karyo was reunited with Harry and Jack Williams, writers of The Missing and Baptiste, for another BBC series, Boat Story (2023), in which he played a gangster known as the Tailor. Though still violent, the tone this time was quirky and ironic.
It was Baptiste, though, who remained closest to his heart. Playing him, said Karyo, “I feel I can be myself more than any other character.”
He is survived by his second wife, the actor Valérie Keruzoré, whom he married in 2002, and their children, Louise and Liv, as well as by a daughter from his first marriage, to the actor Isabelle Pasco, which ended in divorce, and by one grandchild.
