François Truffaut
弗朗索瓦·特吕弗
French director, 1932–1984. He wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before directing The 400 Blows, which brought him the director's prize at Cannes in 1959. He went on to make five films following the character Antoine Doinel, played throughout by Jean-Pierre Léaud.
Career
Truffaut truanted repeatedly as a boy and spent time in an observation centre for delinquents before the critic André Bazin took him in and brought him to Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1954 he published an attack on the literary-adaptation tradition then dominant in French production.
He began directing with The 400 Blows in 1959 and went on to make five films following the character Antoine Doinel, played throughout by Jean-Pierre Léaud across twenty years. Jules and Jim and Day for Night are also among his best known; the latter received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He died of a brain tumour in 1984, aged fifty-two.
