Jean-Pierre Léaud

Jean-Pierre Léaud — Biography

Jean-Pierre Léaud was born on 28 May 1944 in Paris's 20th arrondissement to an assistant scriptwriter father and an actress mother. After auditioning hundreds of children through a newspaper advertisement, François Truffaut recognized a rebelliousness in the fourteen-year-old Léaud that mirrored his own and cast him as Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, which brought him international fame; he returned to the character in five more films over the next two decades. Léaud had a difficult adolescence and was expelled from school, and Truffaut personally took charge of raising him, renting him a studio apartment and giving him assistant work. He became a fixture of the French New Wave through nine films with Jean-Luc Godard, winning the Silver Bear for Best Actor at Berlin in 1966 for Masculin féminin. In 1973, widely seen as the peak of his career, he appeared the same year in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Truffaut's Day for Night and Eustache's The Mother and the Whore. A 1990 film with Aki Kaurismäki gave him a second wind, and he later received an Honorary César in 2000, an Honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2016, the Lumière Award for Best Actor in 2017, and a merit honour from Portugal. He is married to actress Brigitte Duvivier.