François Truffaut

François Roland Truffaut was born in Paris on February 6, 1932. Escaping a fractured childhood through passionate moviegoing, he was mentored by film theorist André Bazin. Writing for 'Cahiers du Cinéma' in the 1950s, Truffaut published the revolutionary 1954 manifesto 'A Certain Tendency in French Cinema', advocating the 'politique des auteurs'—the revolutionary concept that the director is the singular artist of a film.

In 1959, Truffaut made his feature directorial debut with 'The 400 Blows' (Les Quatre Cents Coups), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as troubled youth Antoine Doinel. The film won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, triggering the global French New Wave movement. He followed with 'Shoot the Piano Player' (1960), the lyrical masterpiece 'Jules and Jim' (1962), and 'Day for Night' (La Nuit américaine, 1973), which earned the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Truffaut also authored the definitive book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock ('Hitchcock/Truffaut', 1966) and memorably acted as French scientist Claude Lacombe in Steven Spielberg's 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' (1977). Truffaut passed away from brain cancer on October 21, 1984, at the age of fifty-two, remembered as cinema's eternal poet of human love and celluloid passion.