Louis Malle

From the family fortune to the sea

Malle was born in 1932 in the north of France, into a wealthy industrialist family with roots in the Béghin sugar business, and studied film in Paris. His first major credit was as co-director, with Jacques Cousteau, of the underwater documentary The Silent World (1956), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award. He came to fiction from documentary, which marked the rest of his work.

Elevator to the Gallows and the New Wave

In 1958, at twenty-four, Malle directed Elevator to the Gallows, a thriller of a perfect murder undone by a stuck lift, shot in night-time Paris and scored by Miles Davis, who improvised to the images. Its star was Jeanne Moreau, whom the film made famous. The same year he directed her again in The Lovers, whose frank treatment of an affair made it a scandal and, in the United States, the subject of a Supreme Court obscenity ruling.

Malle reached his debut a year before Truffaut and Godard reached theirs, working the same streets with the same lightness, and is often placed at the edge of the New Wave. He kept his distance from its criticism-first doctrine, and his films — Zazie dans le métro (1960), the desolate Le Feu Follet (1963) — showed a range the movement's labels did not fit.

The French films

Through the 1970s and 1980s Malle made some of his strongest French work: Murmur of the Heart (1971), Lacombe Lucien (1974), which followed a boy drifting into the wartime collaboration and earned his first Oscar nomination, and Au revoir les enfants (1987). The last drew on his own boyhood — a Jewish classmate hidden at his Catholic boarding school under the Occupation, and the arrest that followed — and won the Golden Lion at Venice and three César Awards.

America and last years

From the late 1970s Malle also worked in the United States, directing Pretty Baby (1978), Atlantic City (1980), and the single-conversation film My Dinner with Andre (1981). He married the actress Candice Bergen in 1980. He died of lymphoma in Beverly Hills on 23 November 1995, at sixty-three.