Costa-Gavras

Born: February 13 1933
Where: Klivia, Greece

Costa-Gavras made his reputation as the pre-eminent director developing the political thriller from the late 1960s through the 80s.

Several of his films (State of Siege, Missing) are archetypes of the genre and Z is a crucial fictional account of political repression in the 20th century.

Born to a Russian father and a Greek mother, Costa-Gavras was mesmerized as a boy by the energy and movement of the many American films he saw.

Because of his father's activities in the Greek resistance during WWII, Costa-Gavras's educational and occupational opportunities were stifled when the rightist Greek government blacklisted him.

When he failed to obtain a visa to the US, Costa-Gavras went to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne.

After completing his formal training at the French Film School in 1958 Costa-Gavras started work as a directorial trainee, receiving valuable mentorship from, among others, Rene Clement, Rene Clair and Jacques Demy.

His first film, The Sleeping Car Murder, a detective thriller starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, was followed by the overtly political Shock Troops, a tale of the French Maquis starring Michel Piccoli.

Shown at the Moscow Film Festival in 1967, Shock Troops was re-edited and given a happy ending by United Artists prior to its American release in 1969.

While preparing another project, Costa-Gavras discovered Vassilis Vassilikos's novel Z, based on the events surrounding the assassination of Greek reformer Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963.

His film version, starring Yves Montand, Irene Papas and Jean-Louis Trintignant, touched the consciousness of young cineastes, critics and political activists around the world.

Z won the jury and best actor prizes at Cannes as well as the Oscar for best foreign film.

The Confession followed, again based on a true incident in which a spurious confession was tortured out of a Czech Communist Party functionary (Yves Montand) and used in a sham trial.

With State of Siege he told the story of a clandestine American intelligence agent (Montand) assassinated by Uruguayan political terrorists.

Special Section reunited Costa-Gavras with Jorge Semprun, the screenwriter of Z, on a project devoted to the activities of the French Vichy government.

Roundly criticized by French patriots who had hoped for a melodramatic rewriting of wartime events, Special Section is a meditative and even-handed study of one of the most painful periods of French history.

Clair de femme, an emphatically apolitical film starring Montand and Romy Schneider, was released in 1979.

Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, told of the kidnapping and death-squad murder of Charles Horman, a leftist American journalist, in Chile in 1973.

Betrayed marked Costa-Gavras's first collaboration with screenwriter Joe Ezsterhas, and judging from its considerable implausibility and lack of dramatic tension, one wonders why the director trusted Ezsterhas' vision.

Starring Tom Berenger and Debra Winger, it explored the underworld of racist politics in rural America.

Their second film together, The Music Box, related the trial of an alleged Hungarian war criminal (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and US citizen for 40 years, who is defended in court by his daughter (Jessica Lange).

In 1982, Costa-Gavras took over the directorship of the Cinematheque Francaise, then badly in disarray.

During his tenure, he proved a tireless champion of both film preservation and artistic freedom, furthering the institution's international renown even as he continued to work on his own films.

Recent work includes the disappointing Mad City with Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta and Amen, a limp broadside against the Vatican's complicity with the Nazis.