The renowned French film director Abel Gance was born outside of wedlock in 1889.  His parents encouraged him to begin a career as a lawyer, but from an early age Gance was attracted to the theatre.  He made his stage debut as an actor in Brussels at the age of 19, and then took his first film role, in the 1909 film Molière.

He continued acting and script-writing before forming his own production company in 1911.  That year, he made his first film, La Digue, which, like many of his early films, was not successful.  His five-hour play, Victoire de Samothrace, in which he was to appear with Sarah Bernhardt, was cancelled with the outset of World War I.

Due to ill health, Gance managed to avoid most of the war, and he returned to film making, with more success.   In 1919, He achieved international recognition for his three hour epic J’Accuse, a powerful anti-war film which included location filming of battles shot towards the end of World War I. 

J’Accuse used experimental techniques which the innovative director would develop further in his next monumental film, Napoléon , released in 1927.  The success of this film was undermined by its length (6 hours) and the need for specialist film projection equipment to show the film, particularly the final segment of the film where the screen triples in size to show a staggering panorama of a battlefield. 

Gance did not manage the transition from silent films to sound films successfully.  Although he continued to make films for many decades, he never achieved the celebrity and acclaim he enjoyed in the silent era of the 1920s.  He spent much of his time enhancing his previous silent films, notably making sound versions of his earlier masterpieces, J’Accuse and Napoléon .

In 1943, he fled from France to escape the Nazi occupation.  He resumed his film making career in 1960 with historical dramas such as Austerlitz.  He died in 1981 before he could realise his ambition of making an epic film about Christopher Columbus.