Catherine Deneuve knows her way around attractive men of the silver screen and creative world, Marcello Mastroianni, David Bailey, Serge, and Dean Martin to name a few. She also fell, not to my surprise at all for the forlorn and deep eyes of Francois Truffaut, the legendary director who ushered in the French New Wave with his classic film, 400 Blows. The film was independently funded and dealt with the issues of his own childhood including an absent father, a burgeoning love for cinema and a mischievous adolescence.
While his work is not always my favorite (Mississippi Mermaid, which I was dead set on loving left me cold) there is no denying his vision and if you don't care about the vision he's also pleasing to look at. Dashing but a bit rugged, he looks like a French noir convict complete with fedoras and cigarettes even though reportedly he decided he hated gangsters while making the film adaptation of Shoot the Piano Player.
His career carried through the seventies and eighties with internationally acclaimed films like Day for Night (Oscar winner for best foreign film), The Story of Adele H and The Last Metro. Surely his career would have continued on had he not succumbed to a brain tumor in 1984.
Intensely private, devoted not only to film (he was a huge Hitchcock fan and wrote a biography of his hero) but his love of books (many of which he adapted) Truffaut's work was both enigmatic and universal. He was also an actor and you may recognize him from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
But what do you think?