French film director, screenwriter, critic, actor, producer. Influential film critic and heir to the humanistic cinematic tradition of Jean Renoir. François Truffaut made films that reflected his three professed passions: a love of cinema, an interest in male-female relationships and a fascination with children. He was an exuberant key figure in New Wave films. Some of his most noted films include, “Jules and Jim,” “Day for Night,” “The Man Who Loved Women” and “The Last Metro.”
The son of an architect, he was raised in Paris during the German occupation. With a troubled childhood, he was a school dropout at 14, taking odd jobs and spending a brief stint in the reformatory for theft. Truffaut joined the French army, deserted and was sentenced to a prison term. Critic André Bazin helped secure his release and encouraged his interest in film.
He was addicted to movies from the time he was a kid, escaping the grim reality of life in the magic of cinema. Before entering production, he worked as a journalist and film critic for six years. His vitriolic attacks on the most respected French movies made him notorious in the business. In 1954, Cahiers du Cinema published Truffaut’s “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” a diatribe so abusive that the magazine’s editors prefaced it with a disclaimer.
It was his chance meeting with Madeleine Morgenstern in 1956, the daughter of a prominent French film distributor, that set into motion future events that included both their marriage and his first feature film. He was 27 when he directed “The 400 Blows,” shot on a low budget with an obscure cast, in cramped apartments and on the street. The film was animated by his restless lyricism and intense sympathies even as it demolished the cinematic clichés of childhood. His own miserable childhood supplied him with the story line. Truffaut had been put out to a wet nurse at birth, taken in by his grandmom at three and returned to his parents when she became ill. He endured uncaring parents, cruel teachers, the shock of dubious paternity, theft and reform school. He had his 17th birthday in juvenile detention, and his youth contained two suicide attempts.
Truffaut married Madeleine Morgenstern in 1957 and had two children, Laura Truffaut in 1959 and Eva Truffaut in 1961, both of whom appeared in their father’s film “L’Argent de Poche,” 1975. They later divorced.
The early ’60s were a high-water mark in Truffaut’s life. His first backer, his father-in-law, encourage him to set up a production company and he used it to develop New Wave films. It was his first three films in which his vision flowed most naturally. After then, financial considerations had to be observed more stringently and there were some major disasters: “The Soft Skin,” 1964, was, in the director’s own words, “a complete fiasco,” and it took four years to film “Fahrenheit 451,” 1966.
Truffaut customarily had an affair with his lead actress, and he had a child, Josephine, in 1983, with his lover, Fanny Ardant.
He died of a cancerous brain tumor 10/21/1984, 6:30 AM, Neuilly, France.
Though Truffaut himself became a self-conscious purveyor of nostalgic wistfulness, with his films becoming less a matter of self-revelation than of self-exploitation, the French New Wave might never have existed without his political genius and tactical boldness.
Link to Wikipedia biography