When André the Giant died in January 1993, he was in France — not for work, not for a wrestling appearance, but for family. He had traveled there to attend his father’s funeral. Just twelve days after his father passed, André was gone too.
That father was Boris Roussimouff Stoeff. He was not famous. He never appeared on television or performed on any stage. But he was the man whose family name — in one form or another — became known worldwide through his son.
This article covers who Boris was, where he came from, what records confirm about his life, and how to avoid confusing him with a similarly named Canadian professional who sometimes appears in the same search results.
Who Was Boris Roussimouff Stoeff?
Boris Roussimouff Stoeff was a private individual. He was not an entertainer, an athlete, or a public figure of any kind. Almost everything we know about him comes from genealogy databases and memorial records rather than news archives or public documents.
According to FamilySearch, Boris was born on 15 March 1907 in Ribaritsa, Lovech, Bulgaria. His parents were Dimitar Stoeff and a woman named Mariika, placing the family in rural Bulgaria in the early twentieth century.
Geni records his lifespan as 1907 to 1993, with his death occurring in France at around age 85. Find a Grave has a memorial entry for him that identifies him simply and directly as the “Father of Andre the Giant.”
Beyond these basic facts — birthplace, birth year, parents, death year — there is very little public documentation about his personal life, his occupation, or the details of his daily existence. He lived quietly, and the historical record reflects that.
His Confirmed Connection to André the Giant
André René Roussimoff, known professionally as André the Giant, was born on 19 May 1946 in Grenoble, Isère, France. An Ancestry profile for André explicitly states he was born “to Boris ROUSSIMOFF,” confirming the father-son relationship in writing.
This connection is not based on a single source. Boris is listed as André’s father across multiple independent genealogy platforms — Ancestry, Geni, FamilySearch, and Find a Grave all point to the same person and the same family relationship.
André went on to become one of the most recognizable figures in professional wrestling history. He stood around seven feet tall, competed in WWE for decades, and eventually crossed into mainstream culture through films and television. His father, by contrast, never entered the public eye at all.
That contrast is part of what makes Boris an interesting figure in the broader André the Giant story. Behind one of the most public personas in sports entertainment was a quiet man from a small Bulgarian village, living out his later years in rural France.
The Find a Grave memorial note adds a particularly striking detail: “His son Andre passed away 12 days later while attending his funeral services.” André died on January 27, 1993, in Paris, not long after arriving in France for his father’s funeral. It was one of the last things he did.
Boris’s Bulgarian Origins and the Move to France
Ribaritsa is a small village in the Lovech Province of Bulgaria. In 1907, when Boris was born, Bulgaria was navigating its post-Ottoman independence period and remained largely rural and agricultural. It was a modest, working-class world.
At some point, Boris relocated from Bulgaria to France. That move is confirmed by the fact that André was born in France in 1946 and that Boris died there in 1993. The exact timeline of the migration — when it happened, why, and under what circumstances — is not documented in any available genealogy source.
What is documented is his paternal line. FamilySearch records his father as Dimitar Stoeff, estimated to have been born around 1886, and his mother as Mariika. This gives a three-generation window into André’s paternal ancestry: a Bulgarian family in the Lovech region, whose descendants eventually settled in France and produced one of the most famous athletes of the twentieth century.
Migration from Eastern Europe to Western Europe was common throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, driven by economic opportunity, political upheaval, and wartime displacement. Boris’s move fits a pattern seen across many families of that era, even if the specific reasons behind it remain unrecorded.
Why the Family Name Appears in Multiple Spellings
If you search for Boris across different genealogy platforms, you will find the surname written in several different ways: Roussimoff, Roussimouff, and Roussimoff Stoeff. This can be confusing, but it all refers to the same family.
The variation comes from transliteration. Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, so when Bulgarian names move into French or English records, the spelling depends on who was doing the writing and what conventions they followed. A double-F ending in “Roussimouff” is a French transliteration habit; the single-F “Roussimoff” reflects a more anglicized version. Neither is wrong — they are just different representations of the same name.
The compound form “Roussimoff Stoeff” seen on FamilySearch likely reflects a genealogical convention of combining the family’s French-era surname with the original Bulgarian surname, Stoeff, to help distinguish family lines in tree records.
André’s public career cemented “Roussimoff” as the most widely recognized spelling, simply because it appeared on wrestling programs, biographies, and eventually film credits. But in genealogy records tied to his father, all three variants appear and are treated as the same individual.
Distinguishing Boris (André’s Father) from a Similarly Named Canadian Professional
Anyone who has searched for Boris Roussimoff online may have come across a different person entirely: a Boris Roussimoff-Stoëff based in Montréal, Canada, who works as a licensed insolvency trustee at Mallette, a professional services firm.
This is not André the Giant’s father. The Canadian Boris was born in 1966 — more than half a century after the Bulgarian Boris — and has a documented professional career in Quebec’s financial sector. His educational background and work profile are publicly available through professional directories and his firm’s website.
The name similarity is coincidental and can easily mislead someone running a quick search. The key details that separate them are simple:
- André’s father: Born 15 March 1907 in Ribaritsa, Bulgaria. Died 1993 in France.
- The Canadian professional: Born 23 May 1966. Living and working in Montréal.
They share a surname and possibly distant ancestry, but no genealogy source currently links them. For anyone researching André the Giant’s family, the historical Boris — the one born in 1907 — is the correct person.
What Boris Tells Us About André’s Heritage
André the Giant is often remembered as a larger-than-life figure with a wrestling persona that seemed almost mythological. But his origins were grounded and human. His father was a Bulgarian immigrant who settled in rural France and raised a family far from any spotlight.
André grew up in the French countryside, near Grenoble, in a modest environment. His Eastern European roots through Boris gave him a heritage that often goes unmentioned in the broad strokes of his biography. Wrestling fans know the acromegaly, the career records, the WrestleMania moments. Fewer know that his father was born in a small Bulgarian village and never sought any attention of his own.
For those exploring celebrity ancestry and family history, Boris represents exactly the kind of figure that genealogy databases were built to preserve: a private person whose existence mattered deeply to someone the world would come to know well. Resources like Start Business Advice and similar platforms highlight how personal background shapes even the most public of stories.
A Quiet Life, A Lasting Connection
Boris Roussimouff Stoeff lived for 85 years. He was born in a Bulgarian village, relocated to France, and raised a son who became one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet. He did none of that in public view.
What the records confirm is simple but significant: he was a real person, he was André’s father, and the bond between them was strong enough that André traveled to France to mourn him in his final days — and never made it back.
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