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BIO
François Truffaut was born outside of wedlock on the 6th February 1932.
He never met his real father and was brought up by a mother, Janine (who
resented him) and her husband, Truffaut¹s adoptive father, Roland Truffaut.
In a difficult and rebellious childhood, he sought escape in reading avidly
and frequent trips to the cinema. His passion for films led him to found
a cinema club when he was 16, but that resulted in debt, trouble with
the police, and alienation from his parents. A few years later, during
his military service, he deserted and spent some time in a military prison
in Germany.
With the support of the critic André Bazin, his luck changed and in the
1950s he began a career as a successful, if controversial, film critic
for Les Cahiers du cinéma. He condemned the old guard of French cinema
and proposed a new vision, which he would go on to realise with his friends,
Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and others: the New Wave.
His first film in 1959, Les Quatre Cents Coups, was an instant success,
winning him a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This, and his following
films, were in marked contrast to most French films of the time, using
improvisation, fairly crude editing, location filming, and having a fairly
small budget. His best film, Jules et Jim, was released in 1961, and
is now regarded as a classic of French cinema, with Jeanne Moreau as the
tragic lover Catherine.
In the mid 1960s, Truffaut¹s career slowed as he struggled to get Farenheit
451 off the ground and he laboured on his biography of his hero, Alfred
Hitchcock. His career as a director picked up in the late 1960s and early
1970s with a string of successful and impressive films, including Baisers
volés (Stolen Kisses), Les deux anglaises et le continent and La nuit
américaine (for which he received an Oscar in 1973).
His latter films of the 1980s were generally less successful but still
demonstrated Truffaut¹s capacity to create moving and impressive films.
As well as a director, he was also a creditable actor, appearing in several
of his own films (most notably in L¹enfant sauvage). He also starred
in Spielberg¹s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Most of Truffaut¹s films had a semi-biographical element, reflecting
his life and his moods. A passionate and outspoken man, he was strongly
attracted to women, and had close relationships with many of his actresses,
particularly Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant (who ultimately
bore him a child).
Shortly after completing his final film, Vivement dimanche!, Truffaut
was diagnosed as having a brain tumour in 1983 and, after a slow decline,
died in an American hospital at Neuilly in France on 21 October 1984,
at the age of 52.
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