Biography: life and films
Claude Pinoteau is a French film director and screenwriter
who was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, Seine, France, on 25th May 1925.
He was the brother of Jack Pinoteau, another film director, and, like his
father Lucien Pinoteau, he began his career as a production manager.
In the 1950s and '60s he worked as an assistant to some of the most important
French filmmakers of the day, including Jean Cocteau (
Orphée),
Jean-Pierre Melville (
Les
Enfants terribles), Henri Verneuil (
Un singe en hiver,
Cent
mille dollars au soleil), Jacqueline Audry (
Olivia), Max Ophüls
(
Lola Montès) and Claude Lelouch
(L'Aventure c'est l'aventure).
During this period, he began making his own short films.
Claude Pinoteau's directing career didn't begin in earnest until 1973, when
he helmed the successful thriller
Le
Silencieux, the first of four collaborations with the actor Lino
Ventura. Pinoteau and Ventura worked together on two subsequent thrillers
-
L'Homme en colère
(1979) and
La Septième cible (1984) - and a comedy-drama on
the theme of inter-generational conflict,
La Gifle (1974), which received
the Prix Louis-Delluc. Pinoteau visited the theme of this film in his
subsequent
La Boum (1980) and
La Boum 2 (1982), which both
attracted an audience in excess of four million and made Sophie Marceau an
overnight star. These two films were co-scripted with Danièle
Thompson, who also collaborated with the director on
L'Etudiante (1988),
another successful launch vehicle for Marceau.
The two genres that Pinoteau favoured were thriller and comedy. In
the latter, he was well served by Yves Montand in
Le Grand Escogriffe
(1976) and Jean-Pierre Darroussin in
Cache cash (1994). In his
later years, the director ventured into more serious, dramatic territory,
first with
La Neige et le feu (1991), a wartime romance starring Vincent
Perez and Géraldine Pailhas, and then with
Les Palmes de monsieur Schutz
(1997), a period piece with Isabelle Huppert playing Marie Curie. This
was Pinoteau's last work for the cinema. Subsequently, he made a documentary
on Abbé Pierre for French television and scripted some episodes of
the popular French mini-series
La Bicyclette bleue (2000). He
died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on 5th October 2012, aged 87, and is now
buried in the Saint-Vincent de Montmartre cemetery in Paris.
© James Travers 2017
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