Actors - François Truffaut

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	Actors - François Truffaut

François Roland Truffaut (February 6, 1932, Paris – October 21, 1984, Neuilly-sur-Seine) was one of the founders of the French "New Wave" in filmmaking, and remains an icon of the French film industry. In a a film career lasting just over a quarter of a century, he fulfilled the functions of screenwriter, director, produced or actor in over thirty films.

Life

Truffaut was born out of wedlock in 1930s Paris, where he was raised by his mother and his adoptive father, Roland Truffaut, both of whom were devout Catholics. He never met his biological father, who was a Jewish dentist. Truffaut had a difficult childhood that resulted in rebellion against his parents in particular and authority in general. Truffaut reported that his film The 400 Blows
(1959) was largely autobiographical. His love of films partly came from his elective father, the writer and critic André Bazin.

Truffaut came to filmmaking only after an early career as one of the most outspoken film critics in France, writing for Bazin's les Cahiers du cinéma (he became an editor of the review in 1953). The Cahiers at this time were intensely critical of post-war French cinema; they saw it as overtly literary at the time. As a result of the severity of his critiques, Truffaut was refused a press pass to the 1958 Cannes film festival. Along with his Cahiers colleagues, including Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer, Truffaut was enamoured with Hollywood filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks, then often dismissed as mere genre film makers. In his 1954 article, Truffaut expounded the politique des auteurs, or Auteur theory of cinema which championed the idea that movies should reflect the personal vision and preoccupations of the director.

On October 29, 1957, he married Madeleine Morgenstern at the City Hall in Paris, with whom he had two children, Laura (b. January 22, 1959) and Eva (b. June 29, 1961). His father-in-law, a film producer and distributor, helped to get Truffaut's career off the ground, by financing the making of his first film, the short Les Mistons (1958). He and Morgenstern divorced in 1965. In 1983, he had a daughter with actress and constant companion, Fanny Ardant, Joséphine Truffaut who was born on September 28, 1983, a year before his death.

The dynamics of relationships are a common thread throughout most of his films.

Truffaut was an expert on Sir Alfred Hitchcock, even publishing a book Hitchcock (1962, also known as Hitchcock/Truffaut) which recorded interviews and conversations with Hitchcock. His last film Confidentially Yours
, a comedy thriller in black and white, could be considered to be a "fake Hitchcock".

Truffaut's 1973 production of La Nuit américaine (known in the US as Day for Night) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Also an actor, he sometimes played in his own films, and appeared memorably in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind
.

Truffaut suffered from a brain tumor which was diagnosed in 1983. He died shortly thereafter in the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine at the age of 52. He was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris.

Work

Among Truffaut's films one can discern a series featuring the character Antoine Doinel, played by the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud who began his career in The 400 Blows
at the age of fourteen, continuing as the favourite actor and "double" of Truffaut himself. The series would continue until Love on the Run, while passing by Antoine and Colette
(a short film in the anthology Love at Twenty), Stolen Kisses
and Bed & Board
.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for François Truffaut ]

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