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Born
6 February 1932Paris, FranceDied 21 October 1984 (aged 52) Neuilly-sur-Seine, FranceResting place Montmartre Cemetery Occupations
- Director
- screenwriter
- producer
- actor
- film critic
Years active 1955–1984 Movement French New Wave Spouse Partner(s) Claude Jade (1968; engaged)
Fanny Ardant (1981–1984; his death)Relatives Ignace Morgenstern (father-in-law) François Roland Truffaut (UK: /ˈtruːfoʊ, ˈtrʊ-/ TROO-foh, TRUU-, US: /truːˈfoʊ/ troo-FOH;[1][2] French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁɔlɑ̃ tʁyfo]; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave.[3] With a career of more than 25 years, he is an icon of the French film industry.
Truffaut's film The 400 Blows (1959) is a defining film of the French New Wave movement, and has four sequels: Antoine et Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979). Truffaut's 1973 film Day for Night earned him critical acclaim and several awards, including the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His other notable films include Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), The Soft Skin (1964), The Wild Child (1970), Two English Girls (1971), The Last Metro (1980), and The Woman Next Door (1981). He played one of the main roles in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Truffaut wrote the book Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), based on his interviews with film director Alfred Hitchcock during the 1960s.
Early life
Truffaut was born in Paris on 6 February 1932. His mother was Janine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname. He was passed around to live with various nannies and his grandmother for a number of years. His grandmother instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with her until her death, when Truffaut was eight years old. It was only after her death that he lived with his parents.[4] Truffaut's biological father's identity is unknown, but a private detective agency in 1968 revealed that its inquiry into the matter led to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. Truffaut's mother's family disputed the finding but Truffaut believed and embraced it.[5]
Truffaut often stayed with friends and tried to be out of the house as much as possible. He knew Robert Lachenay from childhood, and they were lifelong best friends. Lachenay was the inspiration for the character René Bigey in The 400 Blows and worked as an assistant on some of Truffaut's films. Cinema offered Truffaut the greatest escape from an unsatisfying home life. He was eight years old when he saw his first movie, Abel Gance's Paradis Perdu (Paradise Lost, 1939), beginning his obsession. He frequently skipped school and snuck into theaters because he lacked the money for admission. After being expelled from several schools, at age 14 he decided to become self-taught. Two of his academic goals were to watch three movies a day and read three books a week.[4][6]
Truffaut frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, where he was exposed to countless foreign films, becoming familiar with American cinema and directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, as well as those of British director Alfred Hitchcock.[7]
October 22, 1984
Francois Truffaut, New Wave Director, DiesBy ERIC PACE
rancois Truffaut, the exuberant film director whose depictions of children, women and romantic obsessions helped make him a leader of the New Wave group of French movie makers, died yesterday. He was 52 years old.
Mr. Truffaut died at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb, a hospital spokesman said. He had been hospitalized about 10 days ago for treatment of cancer.
Widely considered to be the New Wave's most respected member, Mr. Truffaut was one of the most important film directors of the 20th century. Vincent Canby of The New York Times, writing in 1981, called him ''one of the most continuously surprising and accomplished directors of his day.''
Mr. Truffaut's romantic comedy ''Day for Night'' (1973) won an Academy Award for best foreign film of the year. His other noteworthy movies included his first full-length feature, ''The 400 Blows'' (1959), ''Shoot the Piano Player'' (1960), ''Jules and Jim'' (1961), ''Stolen Kisses'' (1968), ''The Wild Child'' (1970), ''The Story of Adele H.'' (1975) and ''Small Change'' (1976).
Mr. Truffaut displayed many strengths in the score of feature films that he made at the rate of almost one a year. His headquarters for years was the Paris office of his production company, Les Films du Carrosse, which he named after ''La Carrosse d'Or (''The Golden Coach''), a film by the French director Jean Renoir.
His admirers had particular praise for his screen depictions of children, obsessed men, and women driven by strong passions. A writer for The Times noted Mr. Truffaut's interest in ''the extremities of romantic agony.''
Mr. Truffaut once said that Europeans, unlike Americans, were leery of making movies about the achieving of grand goals.
''We don't make pictures about taking 5,000 steers across the country,'' he said. ''So what do I do? I take sentiments to the end instead of enterprises'' - as in ''The Woman Next Door'' (1981), which was about adulterous passion.
The emotion that Mr. Truffaut conjured with most was love - in many forms. One particularly memorable treatment was in ''Shoot the Piano Player'' with Charles Aznavour.
''There is more truth in the bedroom,'' Mr. Truffaut once said by way of explanation, ''than in the office or the board room.''
Most Powerful Personage
Mr. Truffaut claimed not to have favorites among his films, but he said that Catherine, the womanly heroine of ''Jules and Jim'' - played by Jeanne Moreau - was probably the most powerful personage he had put on the screen.
''She was the ideal woman seen by a child,'' he once said, ''a sort of fairy tale.''
He also had a flair for creating brief images that lingered in filmgoers' memories. One was the final freeze- frame shot of ''The 400 Blows,'' showing its boy-hero at the ocean.
Another was an image, filmed through rippled glass, of a death-obsessed newspaperman - played by Mr. Truffaut himself - in ''The Green Room'' (1979). Mr. Canby called that image ''the face of those tormented Edvard Munch creatures, just after the scream of terror.''
Movie About Movie Making
Indeed, Mr. Truffaut was so caught up in the technical as well as the artistic aspects of movie making that he even made a movie about movie making - ''Day for Night,'' with Jean- Pierre Aumont. In addition to winning the Academy Award, it was named the best film of 1973 by the National Society of Film Critics in the United States, which also voted him the year's top director.
Another award-winner was his autobiographical ''The 400 Blows,'' which received a Cannes Film Festival prize. It was with that movie - about a plucky, troubled little boy - that Mr. Truffaut took his place in the New Wave.
That was a group of French directors who began making full-length movies in the late 1950's and in 1960, emphasizing the director's role, scorning established, impersonal modes of movie- making and taking more idiosyncratic approaches.
Of all the New Wave - or Nouvelle Vague, as the term was originaly rendered in French - directors, including Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, Mr. Truffaut was probably the softest and most sentimental in his cinematic style, movie historians concluded, and probably one of the most enduring.
Over the years, he worked on the scripts of other directors' films, as well as writing or collaborating on scripts for his own movies. And his production company also produced films for other directors.
A Role in 'Close Encounters'
Mr. Truffaut often acted in films of his own and appeared, in the role of a French scientist, in Steven Spielberg's 1977 ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind.''
In addition to his extensive film work, Mr. Truffaut was also an influential theoretician of films. A film critic before he was a film maker, he was an energetic proponent of the auteur theory of cinema - the idea that it is the director who is the film's true author.
After gaining fame as a director, he continued to write about film and to think in terms of its history. He was particularly learned and enthusiastic about the suspense films of Alfred Hitchcock, who, he wrote in 1979, was distinguished by an ''intimate and profound comprehension of the emotions projected on the screen.''
In his essays on movies, Mr. Truffaut could be epigrammatic or cerebral. He wrote in 1978 that, as a director, Orson Welles made films with his right hand and with his left: ''In the right-handed films there is always snow, and in the left-handed films there are always gunshots.''
Essay on Jean Renoir
Earlier, in a 1967 essay on the film maker Renoir, he argued, ''His work unfolds as if he had devoted his most brilliant moments to fleeing the masterpiece, to escape any notion of the definite and the fixed, so as to create a semi-improvisation, a deliberately 'open' work that each viewer can complete for himself, comment on as it suits him, approach from any side.'' That formulation, Mr. Canby observed, applied also to Mr. Truffaut's own modus operandi.
Yet Mr. Truffaut spoke in more brusque terms of his own directing. He told an interviewer in 1977 that he liked to direct because, ''I prefer to be busy all day long, and when you work for someone else, you're not busy enough.'' The chief difference between a director and an actor, he said, was ''that I think of my own pictures every day, whereas I keep forgetting I was in 'Close Encounters.' ''
Mr. Truffaut thought not only about his own pictures but about his own life, which was drawn on for ''The 400 Blows'' and others in five related movies whose protagonist, Antoine Doinel, was played in each by Jean-Pierre Leaud. Initially modeled on Mr. Truffaut, Antoine began as a self-reliant little boy who develops into a small-time novelist.
Reviewing what was billed as the last film in the Antoine cycle, ''Love on the Run'' (1979), Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the films were ''not only a photographic record of the maturation of a director, an actor and a character over a period of two decades, but a kind of log-book for a voyage through the fictional processes begun with 'The 400 Blows.' ''
That movie was a mainly realistic remembrance of events in the director's life, but in later Antoine films, Mr. Canby noted, Mr. Truffaut turned to ''exploring and projecting through fiction the fears, fantasies and guilts of his life.''
The Son of an Architect
The director's life began in Paris, where he was born on Feb. 6, 1932, the son of Roland Truffaut - an architect - and the former Janine de Monferrand.
Young Francois passed years of his boyhood in the Montmartre quarter, experiencing the German occupation and the powerful emotions it spawned. When a German touched his crew-cut head, his grandmother said with revulsion that the boy should wash his hair.
When he was 11 years old, he read ''Ther ese Raquin,'' a powerful early novel by Emile Zola, and decided to become a novelist.
''What switched me to films,'' he told an interviewer in 1982, ''was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation'' in 1944.
Young Francois became a movie-addict, spending many hundreds of hours in movie theaters. He left school at the age of 14, worked as a welder and in other jobs, and did a brief stint in a reformatory after stealing metal doorknobs to sell them.
Went Into Journalism
His life changed after he was more or less adopted by an influential French film critic, Andre Bazin, and his wife. He went into journalism and then was inducted into the army, which led to his being jailed as a conscientious objector and dishonorably discharged.
Back in civilian life, Mr. Truffaut became well-known - and controversial - for his acid film criticism in the pages of Mr. Bazin's movie magazine, ''Cahiers du Cinema,'' before turning his hand to movie making in the late 1950's.
After ''The 400 Blows,'' Mr. Truffaut went on to make many other films about children, but he once warned that film makers should not be too sentimental in depicting them, and followed that dictum in movies such as ''Small Change.''
As his career unfolded, Mr. Truffaut proved able to breathe visual beauty into widely varied topics. ''The Story of Adele H.,'' about a love-obsessed young woman who follows a British officer to distant places, was one of the Truffaut films that critics cited as showing the director's skill in the depiction of women, and particularly of beautiful women who were prey to shadowy compulsions.
Over the years, his work sometimes came in for criticism. In The Times, Mr. Canby wrote that he was disappointed by ''Confidentially Yours,'' which had its premiere in this country early this year. He called it ''a bright, knowing, somewhat too affectionate variation on the sort of bloodless murder mysteries that were as much a staple of Hollywood production schedules in the 1930's and 1940's as they were of the lending libraries of that era.''
Mr. Truffaut also wrote several books, including one on Alfred Hitchcock in 1966.
Mr. Truffaut's 1957 marriage to Madeleine Morgenstern ended in divorce. He is survived by two adult daughters from that marriage, Laura Truffaut-Wong of San Francisco and Eva Truffaut of Paris, and by a 13- month-old daughter, Josephine. She lives in Paris with her mother, the actress Fanny Ardant, who starred in his 1981 film ''The Woman Next Door'' as well as in ''Confidentially Yours.''
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