François Truffaut

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".