French New Wave film Director who won the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for his seminal 1959 feature The 400 Blows. His 1973 film Day for Night won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and he also directed the critically acclaimed films Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules et Jim (1961) and The Wild Child (1970).
He joined the French Army when he was eighteen years old.
His final film, 1983's Confidentially Yours, was filmed in black and white and was a tribute to his favorite Director, Alfred Hitchcock.
He had three children with his wife Madeleine Morgenstern.
He played the character Claude Lacombe in the 1977 Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
