Francois Truffaut

Born: February 6 1932
Where: Paris, France
Died: October 10 1984 (brain tumour)

The leading French New Wave director is probably best known for the Sixties masterpiece Jules et Jim.

He made films that reflected his three professed passions: a love of cinema, an interest in male-female relationships and a fascination with children.

After a troubled childhood (he quit school at 14 and worked as a messenger), Truffaut joined the French army, deserted and was sentenced to a prison term.

Critic Andre Bazin helped secure his release, encouraged his interest in film and Truffaut responded with proposing the auteur theory - a more personal cinema.

As a filmmaker, Truffaut began by making shorts (Une Visite in 1954 and Les Mistons in 1957) and working as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini.

In 1959 he completed his first feature-length film, the semi-autobiographical childhood story The 400 Blows, about a troubled adolescent, Antoine Doinel.

Truffaut went on to chronicle Doinel's growth in the Antoine and Colette episode of Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board and Love on the Run, all featuring Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine.

In 1961, Jules and Jim defined the modern romantic triangle for a generation - it is the bittersweet story, not of Jules and Jim, the two men, but of Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the woman who dominates their lives and is free, at least, to choose.

The Wild Child was an essay in signs and meaning in which Truffaut himself starred as the historical Dr. Jean Itard, obsessed with understanding how to establish human communication with a boy raised outside of society.

Truffaut also helmed the the ebullient Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, Day For Night, an exuberant celebration of the joy of filmmaking, and the joyous depiction of childhood, Small Change.

The director also displayed a Hitchcockian fascination with life's dark side in The Bride Wore Black, Two English Girls and The Green Room.

"I want a film I watch to express either the joy of making cinema or the anguish of making cinema," Truffaut once said. "I am not interested in all the films that don't vibrate."

In 1976, Truffaut accepted the invitation of wildly successful young American director Steven Spielberg to star in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a scientist.

His stoic portrait in that film is an emblem of Truffaut's - pain; the arduous difficulty a born outsider encounters in communicating.

Truffaut also maintained his role as critic and commentator throughout his filmmaking career, as proud of his books as he was of his films.

Among his publications is a book-length interview with Hitchcock, "Hitchcock-Truffaut" (1967), a perennial critical classic which he revised in 1983.

He died of a brain tumor in the American Hospital in Neuilly in 1984.