László Szabó

"In a small town in Hungary, my mother died on the morning of Easter Monday. I was eleven years old. In the afternoon, I went to the cinema because I did not dare to go home... ". Therefore, as he confided to Release, the young László Szabó does not cease to frequent the dark halls. Arrived in France in 1956, it binds friendship with the "young Turks" of Cahiers du cinéma, and became a diligent of the Cinematheque de Langlois. Claude Chabrol offers him his first roles, in Cousins and A double tour, both released in 1959. Companion of the New Wave, it also appears in Rohmer's work (The Nights of the full moon), Rivette (L'amour par terre) and François Truffaut (The Last Metro), but it is with Jean-Luc Godard that develops an extensive collaboration. Cop suspect in Made in the USA, engineer in Alphaville, he holds a supporting role to offset it in most of the films that the filmmaker in the 1960s, but is found in 1982 in the role of the producer in Passion. Jean-Luc Godard inspires László Szabó, the taste of the staging. The actor signs in 1973 a polar wacky, The white Gloves of the devil, and then, a year later, Zig-Zig, a comedy with Catherine Deneuve and Bernadette Lafont. It returns turn in Hungary his two feature films following David, Thomas and the other in 1985 and Az ember, aki nappal aludt(The man who slept the day) in 2003. But László Szabó remains an actor, in France as in Hungary. Accustomed to shady characters, he embodied, from the 1990s, of the father figures in the works of these young heirs of the New Wave as are Olivier Assayas (cold Water), Arnaud Desplechin (Esther Kahn) or Mathieu Amalric(Eat your soup).