Claude Chabrol

WITHOUT prolific French filmmaker Claude Chabrol it is arguable that the New Wave movement of the 1950s, which spawned such greats as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, would ever have taken off.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy compared Chabrol to 19th century novelist Honore de Balzac and Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais, hailing him as "a great author and a great filmmaker."

"He took the finesse of his social depictions from Balzac. His humour and vividness he got from Rabelais, but he was most of all himself in his films, as in life. And I'm certain that everyone will miss him."

Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe noted the disappearance of "the inventor of an inspired, abounding and profoundly human cinema . . . Chabrol produced an immense and particularly original work that is today a monument of French cinema".

Born in Paris on June 24, 1930, Chabrol became famous for his sombre portrayals of French provincial bourgeois life.

Along with Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he was an icon of French cinema, with all three also working as movie critics for the renowned French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema before launching their careers as directors.

Chabrol directed dozens of acclaimed films during a career spanning more than half a decade, averaging an incredible one film per year.

His first work, the modest Le Beau Serge, made in 1958 and set in the village near Limoges where he had lived as a child, came thanks to his wife's inheritance.

It is regarded as the first New Wave film, pre-dating the efforts of his rivals Godard and Truffaut.

Like most of his subsequent efforts, it was a typically bleak commentary on the middle class French life he saw around him.

It also ruffled the feathers of the French cinema establishment which he had relentlessly attacked in his reviews in Cahiers du Cinema for being conformist.

Le Beau Serge and his follow-up effort, Les Cousins, were both well received by the critics. But his career stalled following a series of indifferent films until 1968 when he released Les biches.

A classy psycho-drama about adultery and murder, it was the first of half a dozen thrillers in as many years which delivered him a worldwide reputation as a brilliant and exciting new talent.

In 2005, at the peak of a career which included more than 80 films for cinema and television, the Academie Francaise awarded him the prestigious Rene Clair Prize.

Chabrol worked right up until the end – his final film, Bellamy, was released last year.

Sometimes characterised as a "mainstream" New Wave director, Chabrol was enduringly popular despite the uneven quality of his films.

Movies were always a part of his life. He spent his boyhood in a rural village where he and a friend filled in their days by constructing a makeshift movie theatre.

He initially studied pharmacology in Paris after the war (his father was a chemist) but was quickly sucked into the cine club culture, mixing with Godard, Truffaut and others who later formed the core of the New Wave revolution.

Chabrol was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and got the chance to interview him for Cahiers du Cinema, with Truffaut, on the set of To Catch a Thief.

The pair apparently fell into a fountain during the interview, so overcome were they after meeting their hero. Hitchcock later remarked that whenever he spied ice cubes floating in his drinks he was reminded of them.

Hitchcock continued to exert a huge influence over Chabrol for most of his career, particularly during the Parisian's heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chabrol's family were also heavily involved in the movie industry. His son Matthieu, whom he had with his first wife Agnes Goute, became a composer and scored many of his father's films in the 1980s.

After divorcing, Chabrol married Stephane Audran, an actress. Their son Thomas also became an actor, while Chabrol's third wife Aurore Paquiss worked as a script supervisor.

Chabrol is survived by his four children.