Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#27823
of 909177 performers
Top 5%
Louis de Funès represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 66 years in, and Louis is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Louis de Funès appears in 16 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Louis. Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! is the clearest case: a film rated 7.6 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, transformation, quiet performance. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for tv movie, history, documentary. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Jean Girault, Claude Zidi, Gérard Oury and others, Louis de Funès helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! (1966) as Stanislas Lefort · The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973) as Victor Pivert · Delusions of Grandeur (1971) as Don Salluste de Bazan
Career snapshot
Ranked #27823 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
16
1956–2022
Career length
66 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.6
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
Average Nutevio score
6.8
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
7.9
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
Most frequent director
Gérard Oury
4 films together
Longest collaboration
4×
With Gérard Oury
Most common genre
Comedy
14 titles
Average runtime
1h 37m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
7.1
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
7.1
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
1960s
6.9 average MV
The 1960s are where the work and the material meet. Hibernatus, Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard, Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
1960s
6.9
Across 7 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2010s
7.7
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1950s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Neither Seen Nor Recognized, La Traversée de Paris.
Most productive era
1960s
7 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | 6.91 film | — | — | — | — |
| Comedy | 6.82 films | 6.97 films | 6.75 films | — | — |
| Crime | — | 6.74 films | — | — | — |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Jambier, grocer.
Highest rated performance · Career peak
1966Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
7.6 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Most recent film
2022Fantômas: A Thoroughly Modern Villain
The current state of the argument, as Self (archive footage).
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
16 of 16 films
as Don Salluste de Bazan
Directed by Gérard Oury
as Léopold Saroyan
Directed by Gérard Oury
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Stanislas Lefort
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! (1966)
Performance score7.9
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Stanislas Lefort gives Louis de Funès a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Victor Pivert
The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973)
Performance score7.7
The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Victor Pivert is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Don Salluste de Bazan
Delusions of Grandeur (1971)
Performance score7.7
Delusions of Grandeur asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Don Salluste de Bazan is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Charles Duchemin
The Wing or the Thigh? (1976)
Performance score7.6
The Wing or the Thigh? asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Charles Duchemin is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as Stanislas Lefort
Start here. Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! is the clearest statement of what Louis de Funès does — accessible, 132 minutes, and rated 7.6 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Louis at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
The Sucker (1965)
Same director as Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
Delusions of Grandeur (1971)
Same director as The Sucker, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973)
Same director as Delusions of Grandeur, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
The Wing or the Thigh? (1976)
Keeps the comedy register of The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Gérard Oury
Director
4 films together
Notably Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
André Hunebelle
Director
3 films together
Notably Fantomas
Jean Girault
Director
2 films together
Notably Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez
Claude Autant-Lara
Director
1 film together
Notably La Traversée de Paris
Yves Robert
Director
1 film together
Notably Neither Seen Nor Recognized
Édouard Molinaro
Director
1 film together
Notably Hibernatus
Serge Korber
Director
1 film together
Notably The One Man Band
Claude Zidi
Director
1 film together
Notably The Wing or the Thigh?
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Gérard Oury
Director
4 films together · 7.2 avg MV
A working relationship rather than a booking — 4 films, and the register shifts each time.
Best film together
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!André Hunebelle
Director
3 films together · 6.6 avg MV
A working relationship rather than a booking — 3 films, and the register shifts each time.
Best film together
FantomasJean Girault
Director
2 films together · 6.6 avg MV
A working relationship rather than a booking — 2 films, and the register shifts each time.
Best film together
Le Gendarme de Saint-TropezClaude Zidi
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The Wing or the Thigh?Claude Autant-Lara
Director
1 film together · 6.9 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
La Traversée de ParisÉdouard Molinaro
Director
1 film together · 6.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
HibernatusYves Robert
Director
1 film together · 6.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Neither Seen Nor RecognizedSerge Korber
Director
1 film together · 6.2 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The One Man BandSix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
as Stanislas Lefort
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
Breakpoint: A Counter History of Progress
as Self (archive footage)
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
as Stanislas Lefort
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Breakpoint: A Counter History of Progress
as Self (archive footage)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
as Stanislas Lefort
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. Louis de Funès has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Career Achievement
Awarded
66 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
Modern Classic Performer
Awarded
Defining performances delivered inside the last twenty-five years, in films already being taught rather than merely remembered.
Comedy Legend
Awarded
14 catalogue titles in comedy, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
as Stanislas Lefort
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
The Sucker
as Léopold Saroyan
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Breakpoint: A Counter History of Progress
as Self (archive footage)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard
as Commissaire Juve
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!
as Stanislas Lefort
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Fantomas
as Commissaire Juve
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Fantomas Unleashed
as Commissaire Juve
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
The One Man Band
as Evan Evans
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
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Have your say
Community
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Reference
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