Claude Chabrol

Born: June 24 1930

Where: Paris, France

The bon viveur's career spans almost 40 years and rages from expensive flops to some of the darkest studies of obsession and murder.

Despite a teenage desire to make films, Chabrol followed his father and trained to be a pharmacist before switching to the law.

Convalescing from chicken pox in Switzerland he met and married a wealthy girl and began writing scripts.

While working as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema money from his wife's inheritance allowed him to leave the magazine and make his first film.

Bitter Reunion was a tragic, rural drama shot in black-and-white and helped define the New Wave of filmmaking that would posit the "auteur," or director, as key creator of his or her cinematic work.

Chabrol followed it with the equally dark and cruelly ironic The Cousins, a decadent tale of Parisian student bohemians.

Its financiall success allowed Chabrol to set up AJYM, his own production company, which financed the first films of Rohmer, Philippe De Broca and Jacques Rivette.

A Double Tour and Les Bonnes Femmes dealt with psychopaths and underlined the director's fascination with murder but the commercial disappointment of the expensive Bluebeard, based on the story of the real-life murderer, made it difficult for Chabrol to find backing for his own projects.

In the Hollywood tradition, he became a director-for-hire, crafting a number of lightweight films which included several spy spoofs.

Chabrol enjoyed his "golden era" in the late 60s, triumphing with a string of highly successful thrillers noted for their subtlety and quiet yet momentum-building dramatic power including Unfaithful Wife, This Man Must Die and The Girlfriends.

Chabrol's biggest commercial successes of the 60s was one of his least favorite films - La Ligne de Demarcation, a drama about French Resistance heroes which he deemed "naive."

It was also during this period that Chabrol cemented long-standing professional relationships, including those with cinematographer Jean Rabier and actress Stephane Audran (who had appeared in The Cousins and whom Chabrol married in 1964).

After a number of professional frustrations and disappointments in the 70s, Chabrol turned to TV work and resumed his theatrical career toward the end of the decade with Violette - another real-life tale of murder - and The Horse of Pride, a poetic look at Breton peasant life.

From 1984 to 1987, Chabrol teamed with producer Marin Karmitz to make a trio of Hitchcockian thrillers, Poulet au vinaigre/Cop Au Vin, Inspector Lavardin and Masques.

The two collaborated again in 1988 on the critically acclaimed Story of Women, a bleak tale of a woman (Isabelle Huppert) who performs illegal abortions in order to support herself during the Nazi occupation of France.

His film adaptation of Madame Bovary, lushly realist and unlike the many other films to use Flaubert's text, was obsessively true to the text but received a lukewarm critical reception.

In 1992, he directed Betty and in 1995 the brutal drama La Ceremonie with Isabelle Huppert while recent work includes the Bordeaux-set Flower of Evil.