Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol — Biography

Claude Henri Jean Chabrol (born 24 June 1930 in Paris; died 12 September 2010 in Paris) was a French director, screenwriter, producer and actor. One of the founding figures of the French New Wave that emerged at the end of the 1950s, Chabrol made more than seventy works for cinema and television over a career spanning half a century, ranging from comedies of manners to film noir and literary adaptations.

He was born in Paris and spent part of his childhood in the provincial region his family came from; that provincial world later became the constant backdrop of his films. After the Lycée Louis-le-Grand he studied medicine, law and literature in Paris. In his twenties he joined the circle around Cahiers du Cinéma, the most influential film magazine of the day, writing as a critic alongside Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. With Rohmer he co-wrote a study of Alfred Hitchcock's cinema, and Hitchcock's influence stayed with him throughout his career.

He was the first of his generation to complete a feature film: Le Beau Serge (1958), shot with money borrowed from his father-in-law, was a provincial drama filmed in the town where he had spent his childhood and was regarded as a manifesto announcing the birth of the New Wave. Les Cousins (1959) confirmed his reputation a year later; in the same period he made films such as Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) and used his own production company to support projects by his contemporaries, among them Le Signe du Lion.

His true signature was the thriller. With a detached, cool and ironic eye he portrayed the hypocrisy of the French bourgeoisie and the greed and crimes hidden behind a respectable facade. The trio of Les Biches (1968), La Femme infidèle (1969) and Kasap (1970) was led by Stéphane Audran, his wife at the time. The adjective "chabrolien", coined from his name, entered the dictionaries, and he was called "the French Hitchcock" and "the Balzac of cinema".

Casting Isabelle Huppert in the lead of Violette Nozière in 1978 began one of the most productive director-actor partnerships in French cinema. The two came together on Bir Kadın Meselesi (1988), Madam Bovary (1991), Seremoni (1995), Hırsız ve Çırağı (1997), Sıcak Çikolata (2000) and İktidar Komedisi (2006). Chabrol did not stop working as he approached eighty; Kötülük Çiçeği (2003), Nedime (2004), İkiye Bölünen Kız (2007) and his last film Bellamy (2009) belong to this late period.

He received the Louis Delluc Prize, the Golden Bear in Berlin, the European Film Academy's lifetime achievement award and the Académie française's René Clair Prize in 2005, and he was nominated for the César many times over. He married Stéphane Audran and later Aurore Chabrol; his sons Matthieu and Thomas Chabrol also worked in cinema, and Thomas, an actor, appeared in many of his father's films. Known for his devotion to French cuisine, Chabrol died in Paris on 12 September 2010 at the age of 80.