Jacques Demy

Jacques Demy — Biography

Jacques Demy emerged at the height of the French New Wave alongside Godard and Truffaut, but set himself apart by putting song, colour and fairy tale at the centre of his cinema. He is remembered above all for the musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), both scored by his lifelong collaborator Michel Legrand. He died in Paris in 1990.

After working with the animator Paul Grimault and the filmmaker Georges Rouquier, he made his first feature, Lola (1961), with Anouk Aimée; the Atlantic coast around his childhood home of Nantes and his themes of fate and chance encounters appear there already. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with every line of dialogue sung and a saturated colour scheme, won the Palme d'Or and the Prix Louis-Delluc. In The Young Girls of Rochefort Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac played sisters. In 1968 he moved briefly to Los Angeles with his wife Agnès Varda; the naturalistic drama he made there, Model Shop (1969), failed with critics and audiences. He then turned to fairy-tale material such as Peau d'Âne (1970), and later made Lady Oscar (1979) and Une chambre en ville (1982).

A shared universe in which characters pass from one film to the next is his signature. Demy was married to Varda; their son was Mathieu, and he adopted Varda's daughter Rosalie. After his death Varda made the documentaries The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993) and The World of Jacques Demy (1995) in tribute.