Dany Boon

Dany Boon (born Daniel Farid Hamidou on 26 June 1966 in Armentieres) is a French actor, film director, screenwriter and producer. Starting as a comedian during the 1990s, he found major success in 2008 as an actor and director in the comedy Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis). He borrowed his stage name from a hero in the American television series about an American trapper. Boon was born into a middle-class family in northern France, studied graphic arts at the Institut Saint-Luc in Belgium, and trained at Cours Simon.

Boon arrived in Paris in 1989, where he worked as a street mime and appeared at open mic nights. He acted in several one-man shows, and in 2003 made a show in the local ch'ti dialect, also known as Picard, whose DVD sold 600,000 copies. His breakthrough film Welcome to the Sticks broke French box office records, eventually being watched by more than 17.4 million people, and made him the highest-paid actor in European film history. He went on to write, direct or star in films including Nothing to Declare (2011), Supercondriaque (2014), Raid Dingue (2017), La Ch'tite Famille (2018), Stuck Together (2021), and Life for Real (2023).

He was also directed by filmmakers such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Micmacs (2009) and starred in The Jews (2016), a film about anti-semitism in France. He provides the French voice of Olaf in the Disney films Frozen and Frozen 2. Boon was president of the 40th Cesar Awards ceremony in 2015, and received the first Cesar du public in the history of French cinema for Raid Dingue. He converted to Judaism in 2002. His awards include Knight of the Legion of Honour and Officer of Arts and Letters.