Jacques Demy

Nantes, and the road to film

Demy was born on 5 June 1931 in Pontchâteau and grew up in Nantes, where his father ran a garage. He was captured early by puppet theatre, operetta, and the cinema, made animated shorts as a teenager, and studied in Nantes and then Paris. Before his own features he apprenticed in two directions at once — with the animator Paul Grimault and the documentarian Georges Rouquier — a training in both artifice and the real that his films would never stop combining.

Lola and the Demy universe

His first feature, Lola (1961), a black-and-white musical romance shot in Nantes and dedicated to Max Ophüls, introduced the method that organised his whole career: a set of characters who reappear from film to film. Roland Cassard, who loves Lola here, turns up again in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; Lola herself resurfaces in the American Model Shop. Demy treated his films as rooms in one house.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a musical in which every line is sung, not just the songs — a form Demy built with the composer Michel Legrand, his most important collaborator. A shop-girl and a garage mechanic fall in love, he is sent to the Algerian War, and life reroutes them both; the colours stay bright while the story turns to loss.

It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1964, from a jury led by Fritz Lang, and made the twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve an international star. Its central melody, carried into English as “I Will Wait for You,” became a standard recorded by singers from Frank Sinatra onward. The film is the clearest statement of Demy's method: pastiche and artifice aimed straight at the heart.

Rochefort, Hollywood, and fairy tales

He followed it with The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), a brighter ensemble musical that cast Deneuve beside her sister Françoise Dorléac and the Hollywood dancer Gene Kelly, again scored by Legrand. Then came a period of range: Model Shop (1969), made in Los Angeles; Donkey Skin (1970), a Perrault fairy tale with Deneuve as a princess in flight; and, later, the sung tragedy Une chambre en ville (1982).

The films did not all find their audience at once, and Demy's reputation dipped before it recovered. It has since settled firmly: the “Demy universe” is now treated as one of the most personal bodies of work in French cinema, and his musicals are revived and restored continuously.

Varda, and after

Demy married Agnès Varda in 1962, and they remained together — two filmmakers of the New Wave's Left Bank wing — until his death. Their son, Mathieu Demy, became an actor and director; Varda's daughter Rosalie grew up in the household.

Jacques Demy died in Paris on 27 October 1990, at 59. The cause was reported at the time as cancer; in her 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès, Varda disclosed that he had died of an AIDS-related illness. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. As he was dying she filmed Jacquot de Nantes (1991), a reconstruction of his Nantes boyhood shot alongside close footage of him, and followed it with two more films tending his work, The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993) and The World of Jacques Demy (1995).