Jean-Pierre Léaud

Born in Paris in 1944, Léaud's on-screen life was given birth in The 400 Blows (1959), as director François Truffaut's fictional alter ego Antoine Doinel...[a performance that was] defiant, withdrawn, and, at the same time, fragile and exposed. It is for this role and the subsequent films in the Doinel cycle that Léaud remains best known. Doinel, the hapless romantic frustrated by modern life, has become one of the best-loved characters in French cinema.

During the same period, Léaud made a number of films with Jean-Luc Godard. While Léaud's performances for Truffaut were that of a lonely, romantic outsider, for Godard, Léaud was a dogmatic and often didactic idealist who also skirted the fringes of life. Truffaut described Léaud's Doinel persona as one who "does not openly oppose society (and in this sense is not a revolutionary), but he is wary of it and goes his own way, on the outskirts of society." Godard, on the other hand, almost always had Léaud play a revolutionary or ideologue, and in many ways, this was closer to the truth of the performer.

Rialto Pictures