François Truffaut

François Roland Truffaut (, ; ; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic.

He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave.

With a career of more than 25 years, he is an icon of the French film industry.

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.

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 snuck into theaters because he lacked the money for admission.

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.

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 those of 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.

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.

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.

Truffaut's film The 400 Blows (1959) is a defining film of the French New Wave movement, and has four sequels: Antoine et Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979).

His other notable films include Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), The Soft Skin (1964), The Wild Child (1970), Two English Girls (1971), The Last Metro (1980), and The Woman Next Door (1981).

Although his theory was not widely accepted then, it gained some support in the 1960s from American critic Andrew Sarris.

Truffaut wrote the book Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), based on his interviews with film director Alfred Hitchcock during the 1960s.

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.

Truffaut's 1973 film Day for Night earned him critical acclaim and several awards, including the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

He played one of the main roles in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).