François Roland Truffaut (UK: TROO-foh, TRUU-, US: troo-FOH; French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁɔlɑ̃ tʁyfo]; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. Widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave, he came under the tutelage of film critic André Bazin as a young man and was hired to write for the latter's Cahiers du Cinéma, where Truffaut became a proponent of the auteur theory, which posits that a film's director is its true author.
The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining film of the New Wave. Truffaut's films Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979) continued to chronicle the story of the couple Antoine and Christine (Claude Jade). Truffaut contributed to another significant milestone of the movement with his work on Breathless (1960), a film directed by his Cahiers colleague Jean-Luc Godard.
Truffaut's other notable films include Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), The Soft Skin (1964), Two English Girls (1971) and The Last Metro (1980). Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) earned him the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He played the doctor in The Wild Child (1970), the director of the film-within-the-film in Day For Night and the scientist in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He starred in The Green Room (1978), based on Henry James's "The Altar of the Dead". He wrote Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), a book-length interview with his hero Alfred Hitchcock which tied for second on Sight and Sound's list of the greatest books on film. Truffaut paid homage to Hitchcock in The Bride Wore Black (1968), Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and his last film, Confidentially Yours (1983).
Truffaut was married from 1957 until 1964 to Madeleine Morgenstern. In 1968, he became engaged to leading actress Claude Jade from three of his films, and lived together with Fanny Ardant, actress in his two last films, until his death. David Thomson writes that "for many people who love film Truffaut will always seem like the most accessible and engaging crest of the New Wave".
Truffaut was born in Paris on 6 February 1932. His mother was Janine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname. He was passed around to live with various nannies and his grandmother for a number of years. His grandmother instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with her until her death, when Truffaut was eight years old. It was only after her death that he lived with his parents. Truffaut's biological father's identity is unknown, but a private detective agency in 1968 revealed that its inquiry into the matter led to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. Truffaut's mother's family disputed the finding but Truffaut believed and embraced it.
Truffaut often stayed with friends and tried to be out of the house as much as possible. He knew Robert Lachenay from childhood, and they were lifelong best friends. Lachenay was the inspiration for the character René Bigey in The 400 Blows and worked as an assistant on some of Truffaut's films. Cinema offered Truffaut the greatest escape from an unsatisfying home life. He was eight years old when he saw his first movie, Abel Gance's Paradis Perdu (Paradise Lost, 1939), beginning his obsession. He frequently skipped school and sneaked into theaters because he lacked the money for admission. At age eleven, he read Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1868), which inspired him to become a novelist. After being expelled from several schools, at age 14 he decided to become self-taught. Two of his academic goals were to watch three movies a day and read three books a week.
"What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation". Truffaut frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, where he was exposed to countless foreign films, becoming familiar with American cinema and directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, as well as British director Alfred Hitchcock.
After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met André Bazin, who had a great effect on his professional and personal life. Bazin was a critic and the head of another film society at the time. He became a personal friend of Truffaut's and helped him out of various financial and criminal situations during his formative years.
Truffaut joined the French Army in 1950, aged 18, but spent the next two years trying to escape. He was arrested for attempting to desert the army and incarcerated in military prison. Bazin used his political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his new film magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma.
Over the next few years, Truffaut became a critic (and later editor) at Cahiers, where he became notorious for his brutal, unforgiving reviews. He was called "The Gravedigger of French Cinema" and was the only French critic not invited to the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. He supported Bazin in developing one of the most influential theories of cinema, the auteur theory.
In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article in Cahiers du cinéma, "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Certain Trend of French Cinema"), in which he attacked the state of French films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers, and listing eight directors he considered incapable of devising the kinds of "vile" and "grotesque" characters and storylines he called characteristic of the mainstream French film industry: Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt. The article caused a storm of controversy and landed Truffaut an offer to write for the nationally circulated, more widely read cultural weekly Arts-Lettres-Spectacles. Truffaut wrote more than 500 film articles for that publication over the next four years.
Truffaut later devised the auteur theory, according to which the director was the "author" of his work and great directors such as Renoir or Hitchcock have distinct styles and themes that permeate their films. Although his theory was not widely accepted then, it gained some support in the 1960s from American critic Andrew Sarris. In 1966, Truffaut published his book-length interview with Hitchcock, Hitchcock/Truffaut.
After having been a critic, Truffaut decided to make films. He began with the short film Une Visite (1955) and followed it with Les Mistons (1957).
After seeing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil at the Expo 58, Truffaut made his directorial debut with The 400 Blows (1959), which received considerable critical and commercial acclaim. He won the Best Director award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. The film follows the character of Antoine Doinel through his perilous misadventures in school, an unhappy home life and later reform school. It is highly autobiographical. Both Truffaut and Doinel were only children of loveless marriages; they both committed petty crimes of theft and truancy from the military. Truffaut cast Jean-Pierre Léaud as Doinel. Léaud was seen as an ordinary boy of 14 who auditioned for the role after seeing a flyer, but interviews after the film's release (one is included on the Criterion DVD of the film) reveal Léaud's natural sophistication and an instinctive understanding of acting for the camera. Léaud and Truffaut collaborated on several films over the years. Their most noteworthy collaboration was the continuation of Doinel's story in a series of films called "The Antoine Doinel Cycle".
The primary focus of The 400 Blows is Doinel's life. The film follows him through his troubled adolescence. He is caught in between an unstable parental relationship and an isolated youth. From birth Truffaut was thrown into a troublesome situation. As he was born out of wedlock, his birth had to remain a secret because of the stigma of illegitimacy. He was registered as "a child born to an unknown father" in hospital records and looked after by a nurse for an extended period of time. His mother eventually married and her husband gave François his surname, Truffaut.