Michel Dejeneffe, the Belgian ventriloquist and puppeteer who created the beloved comic puppet Tatayet, has died at the age of 77 in the Saint-Étienne region of France. Born in Namur on 10 December 1948, Dejeneffe launched his puppetry career in 1975, the same year he introduced Tatayet, a brown-furred, nasal-voiced marionette with whom he formed a hugely popular comic duo.
The pair became fixtures of Belgian and French television through the 1980s and 1990s, performing on shows hosted by Michel Drucker and Patrick Sébastien in France and starring in the Tatayet Show on RTBF from 1986 to 1992, as well as appearing on the weekend programme Bon Week-end. Dejeneffe retired from the stage in 2017, ending a career that spanned more than four decades.