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, Truffaut’s 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, François Truffaut's luck changed for the better.  In the 1950s he began a career as a successful, if controversial, film critic for Les Cahiers du cinéma .  In an article entitled "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" , published in January 1954, Truffaut launched a fierce attack on the old guard of French cinema, as represented by the likes of Jean Delannoy and Claude Autant-Lara.   This helped to precipitate a major upheaval in the French film industry, coinciding with the arrival of a new tranch of talented young film makers who were eager to make their mark.  This "new wave" (nouvelle vague) of film directors gave its name to the exciting and innovative years of French cinema which followed.  Truffaut himself, along with the friends he made whilst working for Les Cahiers du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer) would play a pivotal role in the French New Wave. 

Truffaut made two short films before making his first full-length film, Les Quatre Cents Coups, in 1959.  This film was a poignant semi-autobiographical work in which Truffaut drew on his own troubled experiences as a young teenager.  It was the first instalment in a series of five films which Truffaut made over the next twenty years featuring Truffaut's alter-ego, Antoine Doinel, played by the delightful Jean-Pierre Léaud. 

Although made on a very small budget, Les Quatre Cents Coups proved to be a popular success.  The film earned Truffaut the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 and established him as a serious film director.  Flush with this success, Truffaut indulged his passion for American crime-thriller in his next film, Tirez sur le pianiste.  Although now regarded as a masterpiece, the film was a commercial disaster when it was released in 1960 and this badly damaged Truffaut's confidence. 

Realising that if he were to succeed as a film director he had to make films which would appeal to the public, Truffaut was very careful in choosing the subject for his next film.  He had long considered making a film adaptation of a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché entitled Jules et Jim and now, with two films under his belt, he felt up to the challenge.   The film would be Truffaut's greatest film, a heartrending portrait of friendship and love involving two friends and their shared lover, with a stunning performance from Jeanne Moreau.  Jules et Jim proved to be an international success and marked the high-point in Truffaut's career.

Truffaut's next film, La Peau Douce, was another romantic drama involving an ill-fated love triangle, but was far less successful than Jules et Jim.  Over the next few years, Truffaut’s career slowed as he laboured on his biography of his hero, Alfred Hitchcock whilst struggling to get his film adaptation of Farenheit 451 off the ground.  Science fiction, like American pulp fiction, was a genre which greatly appealed to Truffaut, although his experiences with Farenheit 451 put him off making a second science-fiction film.

After another fairly ill-received thriller, La Mariée était en noir, Truffaut regained his former popularity with the third episode in his Antoine Doinel series, Baisers volés.  This film, an enchanting romantic comedy starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade, was a great success, not just in France, but abroad, most notably in the United States.  Ironically, Truffaut was, at the time, distracted by the turbulent political events of 1968 (in particular, lending his support to the campaign to get Henri Langois re-instated as the director of the Cinémathèque Française).

For his next film, La Sirène du Mississippi, another American-style thriller, Truffaut worked with two of France's leading actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.  Despite such star billing, the film was a flop.   The next few years saw a rich diversity in Truffaut's work, including the poignant historical drama L'Enfant sauvage (1969), the next Antoine Doinel outing Domicile Conjugale (1970) and an ambitious adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché's second novel Les Deux anglaises et le continent (1971).  In Une belle fille comme moi (1972), Truffaut made his one and only black comedy, a bizarre mix of thriller and comedy featuring a stunning performance from Bernadette Lafont, an actress favoured by the New Wave directors.

In 1973, Truffaut won the Best Foreign Film Oscar for La Nuit américaine , a frantic comedy about film-making, in which Truffaut (by this stage an accomplished actor)  also starred.  This was followed by another ambitious historical drama starring Isabelle Adjani, L'Histoire d'Adèle H (1975) and then a compelling study of young children, L'Argent de poche (1976).

Truffaut's next film, an unusual portrait of a man obsessed with women, L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) scored another popular success.  The film reflected Truffaut's own complicated love life, which was strewn with short-lived but intensely passionate romances, often with the female leads of his films (including Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, amongst others). 

La Chambre verte (1978) was, consciously or unconsciously, a tribute to those cherished friends whom Truffaut had lost in recent years.   It is a sombre and intense work, but was not a great commercial success.  His next film was a total contrast, L'Amour en fuite (1979) being the last instalment in the Antoine Doinel series.  Despite being partly a compilation of Truffaut's earlier films, this film was a success, although the director was far from satisfied with the end result.

Truffaut's next film, Le Dernier métro (1980), was to be his last critical and box office success.  A wartime drama set in a theatre, and starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, the film swept the board at the 1980s César Award Ceremony, winning no less than ten awards, in categories which included best film, best director, best actor, best actress, best cinematography and best screenplay.

Truffaut worked with Gérard Depardieu for a second time on his next film La Femme d'à côté (1981), a strikingly black portrait of obsessive love.  The film starred Fanny Ardant who would become Truffaut's partner, bearing him his third child.  The actress also starred in Truffaut's final film, Vivement dimanche! (1983),  a comedy thriller in which the director's admiration for Hitchcock is more than noticeable. 

As well as a director, François Truffaut was also a creditable actor, appearing in some of his own films (most notably in L’Enfant sauvage).  He also starred in Spielberg’s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

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.

The range of subjects in François Truffaut's oeuvre is large, encompassing noirish thriller, romantic comedy, tragic romance, science-fiction, portraits of adolescence and period drama.  The two things which unify this great diversity of subject matter and makes Truffaut's works a coherent whole are a consistent humanity and their auto-biographical content.  Truffaut had at least three great passions in his life: women, cinema and American pulp fiction.  These passions were such a big part of his life that it is no surprise they should be so keenly reflected in his films.  Truffaut was also a great humanist, who supported many worthy causes for children, and this humanity is also an essential element of his films. 

Despite his premature death, François Truffaut made an enormous impact on cinema and his films have an enduring popular appeal.  Most significantly, he did a great deal to promote the idea of the director as an auteur , making him the inspiration for future generations of independent film-makers.

© James Travers 2002
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