László Szabó

The veteran of over 120 films in France, America and his native Hungary, Laszlo Szabó was born in Budapest in 1936. He began his acting career in 1952 in Hungary and made his first appearance in a French film in 1959, with a small part in Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins. In the 1960s, Szabó became a familiar figure in films of the French New Wave, becoming particularly associated with Jean-Luc Godard - a collaboration that spanned over thirty years.

Their nine films together include Vivre Sa Vie, Le Petit Soldat, Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde, Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville, Made in USA, Week End and Passion. He has also appeared in films by most of the great figures of French cinema of the last forty years, including François Truffaut (The Last Metro), Costa-Gavras (The Confession), Eric Rohmer (Full Moon in Paris), Jacques Rivette (Love on the Ground and Up, Down, Fragile), and Patrice Chéreau (Judith Therpauve), and has worked with younger generation directors Arnaud Desplechin (The Sentinel, Esther Kahn) and Olivier Assayas (Cold Water, Tous les garçons et les filles de leur ages).

He has also written and directed several films in France and Hungary, including his first film Les Gants blancs du diable/The White Gloves of the Devil (1973), starring Bernadette Lafont, and the crime drama Zig Zig I1975), starring Catherine Deneuve. Director François Truffaut, who directed him in The Last Metro and compared his silhouette to The Maltese Falcon's, praised Szabo as a strange and poetic actor. László Szabó lives today in Manhattan, where he works as an actor, director and acting teacher.

Rialto Pictures