Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol started as a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma alongside Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Rivette, then broke into directing with Le Beau Serge in 1958, a Hitchcock-inspired debut that set the template. Thrillers became his signature - distanced, objective studies of violence often set among the comfortable classes - and he returned to them for half a century while his New Wave colleagues scattered into other forms. Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, and Le Boucher in the late sixties all starred Stéphane Audran, his wife at the time. In 1978 he cast Isabelle Huppert in Violette Nozière and the partnership stuck: they made Madame Bovary in 1991 and La Cérémonie in 1995. Critics noted the difficulty of capturing his work on paper - so much turned on a hedonistic relish for the medium itself, a craftsmanship and precision that felt less like experiment than refinement.