During the 1990s, Chris Benoit wrestled for many major North American and Japanese wrestling promotions, including New Japan Pro-Wrestling and Extreme Championship Wrestling.

He is a two-time world champion, having captured the WCW World Heavyweight Championship in 2000 and the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in 2004. Other singles titles include one IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship, five WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Championships, three WCW World Television Championship and four WWE Intercontinental Championships. He has also won major tournaments such as the 1994 edition of the Super J Cup and the 2004 edition of the Royal rumble match.

His wrestling career would have secured him a place in the WWE Hall of Fame, but was overshadowed by his tragic death in 2007, which made him one of the most talked about and criticized characters in the world of wrestling.

On Monday, June 25, 2007, Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy and son Daniel Benoit were found dead in their Fayetteville, Georgia home at approximately 2:30 pm EST. The first notification of the Benoit family's deaths was given by World Wrestling Entertainment through its mobile news service; a few hours later the news was also published on the federation's official website.

In the hours following the tragedy, the hypothesis began to spread among the media that at the basis of Chris Benoit's act there had been a fit of rage caused by the use of some anabolic substances found in his house.

On 27 June 2013, Nancy Toffoloni's sister, Sandra, declared in an interview that her brother-in-law would still have died a year after the tragedy since the autopsy showed that his heart was three times larger than normal due to the continuous taking steroids and painkillers, which in turn drove him into a state of paranoia. The woman also said she was aware of the fact that Benoit was about to retire from competitive activity and that he intended to open a wrestling school in Georgia, but all of this was temporarily shelved due to the push that WWE wanted to grant the Canadian in that period.