Claude Chabrol, one of the founding players of the French New Wave, and the director of more than fifty films, has died in Paris, aged 80.
Starting out as a pharmaclogist at the University of Paris, he was drawn to the cinema, and like his nouvelle vague contemporaries Francois Truffault, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette, was a critic for the seminal French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema.
His Les Bonnes Femmes was one of the earliest films of the nouvelle vague: an intriguing mix of romantic comedy and psychological horror. But as the most "commercial" of his contemporaries, it was for his thrillers, poking around in the rotten core of bourgeois society, that he became most revered. At the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said that he'd read it meant the end of class war, and commented "only someone with money would say such a thing". His hero was Alfred Hitchcock, whom he and Truffault interviewed for Cahiers in 1955. Fifteen years later, Hitchcock would pay Chabrol the ultimate compliment by saying he wished he'd directed Le Boucher.
Among the most famous and influential films in his prolific career were La Femme Infidel (1968) and Que La Bete Meure (1969). He won the Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear award in 1959 for Les Cousins; was nominated twice for the Palmes d'Or at Cannes (for Violette Noziere in 1978 and Poulet au Vinaigre in 1985); and the Academie Francaise awarded him the Rene Clair Prize for lifetime achievement in 2005. He made a film a year throughout his long career, and his final murder mystery Bellamy, starring Gerard Depardieu, was released in 2009.
Despite his penchant for dark subject matter, Chabrol was known for his* joie de vivre. *Tributes to the director have already poured in from across France, with Serge Toubiana, the director of the French Cinemateque in Paris, calling him "the best French filmmaker", and President Sarkozy comparing him to Balzac and Rabelais. Thierry Frémaux, the chairman of the Cannes film festival, said, "His energy gave the feeling that he was here for good."
Chabrol was married three times and is survived by four children.