One of the founding fathers of the New Wave of French film, Chabrol was best known for his masterful suspense thrillers, subversive female roles and stinging critiques of the bourgeoisie. His first work, Le Beau Serge, was released in 1958 and he made more than 80 films, his last – a murder mystery starring Gérard Depardieu – released last year.
In the wake of his death, announced with no further details by a cultural official at Paris city hall, tributes poured in, both professional and personal. Speaking on French radio, Depardieu said: "Claude was joie de vivre itself. I cannot bring myself to believe he has gone. At no moment did he speak of death."
Chabrol, whose career began amid the creative boom that was French cinema in the late 50s and 60s, continued to make films long after the initial excitement of the Nouvelle Vague, adapting his style and themes according to the changing times. He remained fascinated with psychological tensions and inspired by class restlessness, often making unsettlingly dark films that contrasted with his real-life public image as a genial bon vivant.
"He was an absolutely delicious man: mischievous, with an incredible intelligence of which he only let certain sides come through," said Serge Toubiana, director of the French Cinémathèque in Paris, who drew particular attention to the years in which Chabrol released The Butcher, a thriller that Alfred Hitchcock said he wished he had made, and 1969's The Unfaithful Wife.
"I would dare say that there was a period in French cinema, I'm thinking about the late 60s ... when he was, in my opinion, the best French film-maker," said Toubiana.
Some of Chabrol's most respected later films - including Story of Women, his haunting 1988 tale of a Vichy-era abortionist, and La Cérémonie, released in 1995 – featured Isabelle Huppert, the award-winning actor whose disturbing portrayals of women on the brink of madness often have fitted well with Chabrol's vision.
It was for her role as a young murderess in Violette Nozière that she won the best actress award at Cannes in 1978, and as a bitter postal office worker in La Cérémonie that she garnered her only Cesar.
Thierry Frémaux, chairman of the Cannes film festival, said Chabrol would above all be remembered for his love of those he cast in his films. "He was someone who tapped into many generations of actors," Fremaux said on French radio, describing the director's death as "a thunderbolt". "[He] was 80 years old but he was still working, and his energy, joie de vivre ... gave the feeling that he was here for good."
It was not only Chabrol's fellow artists who paid him tribute but also France's political leaders. The former culture minister Jack Lang saluted his "vital energy"; the Socialist leader, Martine Aubry, hailed his "great finesse". Chabrol is survived by a rapidly diminishing cohort of Nouvelle Vague greats, foremost among them Jean-Luc Godard, the 79-year-old Breathless director currently keeping Hollywood on tenterhooks as to whether or not he will show up to collect an honorary Oscar this year. Most of the other major names of the period, including Francois Truffaut, have long gone; Eric Rohmer died in January.
"Every time a film-maker dies, a singular view of the world and a particular expression of our humanity is irreparably lost to us," said the French film directors' association.
We look back over his career with a selection of clips from his films
Along with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol ushered in the New Wave that washed over French cinema at the end of the 1950s. Like them a critic turned filmmaker, Chabrol shared their appreciation of classical genre form – to some, he appreciated it too much, exploring rather than subverting its strictures. But his prodigious output and technical mastery assure his place as one of the great figures of cinema's first century.
Films like Les Cousins (1959), Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) and L'Oeil du Malin (1962) developed Chabrol's interests in youth, the city vs the provinces and modern morality, as well as his often ironic, detached style, but the mid-1960s saw him turn to more overtly commercial projects. The psychological drama Les Biches (1968) marked a new phase, cementing an interest in the narrative use of space, interlopers disrupting relationships and starring Chabrol's personal and artistic muse Stéphane Audran.
In true auteurist style, Chabrol's films worked through repeating themes and motifs: bourgeois conformity struggles to contain raw passion, those pursuing horrific courses are made sympathetic, often in situations involving characters named Charles, Paul and Helene. Examples from the late 1960s and early 1970s include Que la Bête Meure (1969), Juste Avant la Nuit (1971) and Le Boucher (1970), in which a butcher who might be a killer courts a teacher.
Comparisons with Hitchcock – as well as Fritz Lang and, to a lesser extent, Billy Wilder – would recur throughout Chabrol's career, even as its practice changed. The 1970s saw him moving on to work with a new team of regular collaborators and working more on television and international co-productions. La Décade Prodigieuse (1971) tapped Hollywood iconography with a role for Anthony Perkins lusting after his mother and overlooked by Orson Welles's imposing paterfamilias. Chabrol also began working with Isabelle Huppert, whom he cast in complex roles exploiting her often opaque beauty: as the teenage patricide in 1978's Violette Nozière, for instance, and the abortionist capital convict a decade later in Une Affaire de Femmes, whose attention to wartime collaboration proved controversial. To many critics, the concision and sustained quality of Chabrol's earlier work dropped off in the 1980s and 1990s but he remained prolific; titles such as Madame Bovary earned domestic success while 1990's Docteur M and 1994's L'Enfer paid explicit tribute to Lang and Henri-Georges Clouzot. Murder and class tensions were to the fore again in the internationally acclaimed La Cérémonie (1995), also with Huppert, in which a transgressive relationship threatens the veneer of village life. The film was followed by Merci pour le chocolat (2000) and Le Fleur du Mal (2003), also widely praised, and he continued working until close to his death.
