The larger-than-life, conservative petit bourgeois characters he played, who typically kissed up to authority while persecuting their subordinates, particularly resonated with the changing Western societies of the 1960s and drove him to success.

[3][4] He enjoys widespread international recognition: in addition to his immense fame in the French-speaking world, he remains a household name throughout most of continental Europe including the former Eastern Bloc, the former Soviet Union, as well as Iran, Turkey, and Israel.

He later dropped out, and his early life was rather inconspicuous; as a youth and young adult, De Funès held menial jobs, from which he was repeatedly fired.

Through the early 1940s, De Funès continued playing piano in clubs, thinking there was not much call for a short, balding, skinny actor.

During the occupation of Paris in the Second World War, he continued his piano studies at a music school, where he fell in love with a secretary, Jeanne Barthelémy de Maupassant.

De Funès began his show business career in the theatre, where he enjoyed moderate success and also played small roles in films.

[13] He appears on screen for less than 40 seconds in the role of the porter of the cabaret Le Paradis, welcoming the character played by Jérôme Chambon in the entrance hall and pointing him to the double doors leading to the main room, saying: "C'est par ici, Monsieur" ("It's this way, Sir").

During this period, De Funès developed a daily routine of professional activities: in the morning, he did dubbing for recognized artists such as Totò, an Italian comic of the time; during the afternoon, he did film work; and in the evening, he performed as a theatre actor.

A break came in 1956, when he appeared as the black-market pork butcher Jambier (another small role) in Claude Autant-Lara's well-known World War II comedy, La Traversée de Paris.

After their first successful collaboration, director Jean Girault perceived De Funès as the ideal actor to play the part of the scheming, opportunistic and sycophant gendarme; the first film would lead to a series of six.

Another collaboration with director Gérard Oury produced a memorable tandem of De Funès with Bourvil—another great comic actor—in the 1965 film, Le Corniaud.

In a departure from the gendarme image, De Funès collaborated with Claude Zidi, who wrote for him a new character full of nuances and frankness in L'aile ou la cuisse (1976), which is arguably one of the best of his roles.

Capable of an extremely rich and rapidly changing range of facial expressions, he was nicknamed "the man with forty faces per minute."

In many of his films, he played the role of a humorously excitable, cranky, middle-aged or mature man with a propensity for hyperactivity, bad faith, and uncontrolled fits of anger.

In De Funès's successful lead role in a cinematic version of Molière's The Miser, these characteristics are greatly muted, percolating just beneath the surface.

He was also portrayed in French comics, including as a gambler in Lucky Luke ("The One-Armed Bandit")[17] and as a film studio worker in Clifton ("Dernière Séance").

The behavior, diminutive size, and body language of the character Skinner from the 2007 Pixar animated film Ratatouille are loosely based on Louis de Funès.