Life and Career
Chabat was born in Oran, French Algeria. He is Jewish.
His media career began in 1987 when he founded the comedy group "Les Nuls" (The Dummies) with Bruno Carette, Chantal Lauby and Dominique Farrugia. Les Nuls' first appearance on French television, on the subscriber channel Canal Plus, was a sci-fi spoof entitled Objectif Nul (a word play with Objectif Lune, the French title of the comic album Destination Moon, one of The Adventures of Tintin). The show shares striking similarities with the British TV series Red Dwarf, although both shows were released at roughly the same time and it is unlikely one influenced the other.
Both as a member of Les Nuls (in La Cité de la Peur) and in his solo efforts (including Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, in which he both directed and acted), Chabat is one of the few French comedians who has managed to successfully emulate the heavily referential, pop-culture-based writing style of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker trio and adapt it to the tastes of the French audience.
Chabat also voiced the title character in the French dubs of all three Shrek films, replacing Mike Myers. He won the César Award for Best Debut in 1998 for Didier.
He also acted in Happily Ever After (2004) and in Prête-moi ta main (2006) alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg. He played Napoleon Bonaparte in the 2009 film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
Read more about this topic: Alain Chabat
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
“Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don’t see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.”
—Donald Sinden (b. 1923)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)